Game Development - 2013-07-03 (page 1 of 4)

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12:08 AM

@Byte56 do you have any tips on how to texture a mountain realistically current im just painting a rock texture on it and it looks... well... average

user image

@Dave you want 3 zones. grass/dirt/trees on the bottom, rock in the middle, and snow on top. and if you have a whole range of mountains, even if they're different heights, put the lines between zones at roughly the same location.

if the mountain isn't supposed to be high enough, you can scrap the snow

for trees i think ill try a particle system with weight paint i ain't got that far yet :P

i often see mountains with trees rather than dirt

but i understand what you mean by using transitional textures

12:31 AM

I'm not really a great artist, but I would try putting some more textured, darker areas in the crevasses. And more transitional stuff around the bottom.

Like this:

user image

user image

holy hell

how the heck

turbosquid.com/3d-models/rocky-mountain-ready-3d-model/654659

lol well im not buying that xD

but it looks great

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting buying it. Just learning from it.

1:05 AM

1

Q: What should we use chat stars for?

In the chat, messages can be starred by clicking the little star icon to the right of each message. The tooltip for this star is "star this message as useful / interest for the transcript." Messages thus starred appear in the right panel of the chat room UI, beneath the room and user information ...

discussion chat stars

@JoshPetrie Aw, I was hoping you'd be able to edit before it marked it in the edit history.

user4704

hehe

user4704

oh well

It's the little races against time like that.

Sort day at work eh? What's that noon to 5?

user4704

ssssh

user4704

1:12 AM

still on vacation a little

I guess it's a slow week for work in software.

Happens all the time when there's a holiday not adjacent to a weekend.

People just take the whole week off.

At least I assume game developers do the same.

Though I guess you have different deadlines as an MMO. Holiday events and whatnot.

user4704

we have the 4th off

user4704

so yeah. light week

Christian Frantz

1:49 AM

Woo got chat to work.

Got the 4th and they set the 5th as a holiday. Planned to use the 4 day weekend to get more gameplay stuff done. But we've got like, two music videos to film in the time :\

user4704

I'll probably take the 5th off too.

user4704

Which means I had a 1.5 day work week ;)

Christian Frantz

Byte you in here?

Sean Middleditch

... it took a lot of mental effort to not just post "short answer: no" in response to the "Can I become a Game Designer?" question. i'm practicing keeping my inner jerk at bay, but man, it's hard.

user4704

2:04 AM

lol

Sean Middleditch

@JoshPetrie: how're things at work going?

user4704

I dunno, I was on vacation. Just got back today, and only got through half my email backlog.

Sean Middleditch

aah. fun. everyone's doing holidays right now it seems

like it's summer or something

there ever been discussion about how to get more professionals contributing to GDSE, either with answers or questions?

user4704

It was a topic in the election.

user4704

See answers here: meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1192/…

user4704

2:19 AM

My current pet theory is that it's better to try and engage them in chat first.

user4704

Since it's more forgiving of general, subjective, possibly hand-wavy discussions

user4704

Which are easier for a professional to give without worrying about compromising his or her professional responsibility to an employer.

Sean Middleditch

so it was; already managed to forget that election just happened :)

user4704

Thus, my recent campaign against dumb stars meta.gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/1222/…

Sean Middleditch

fair enough. what, you don't think "(╯°□°）╯︵ slɐɯɹou" is a useful starred comment that has enriched the fabric of our recorded chat history?

user4704

2:22 AM

:P

@ChristianFrantz yes

Christian Frantz

Alright. Lets figure some of this out so I can stop asking questions lol

@SeanMiddleditch Flipping the normals is an important debugging step

Sean Middleditch

... sigh.

:p

@ChristianFrantz OK

Christian Frantz

2:30 AM

I think the methods I use to create each side of the cube can be useful, if I can figure out how to tell which side needs to be drawn

By using the isSolidAt method you've described

Sean Middleditch

@Byte56: I always read that kirby icon as a different four-letter 'f' word, but my eyes have now been opened to the possibility of more literal interpretations :)

@ChristianFrantz I agree. But you'll need to change the way you're storing things.

Christian Frantz

What do you mean by that?

I use a list to store all the indices that have to be drawn and then use ToArray()

How do you first determine which faces need to be drawn?

Christian Frantz

I dont. That's what I'm having trouble with. Each cube is drawn with six faces so that creates a lot of wasted memory

2:36 AM

OK, how do you know where to draw a cube with six faces?

Sean Middleditch

ah, the most popular form of culling: "cull it only if it doesn't exist"

Christian Frantz

I have a 2d array (map) which is just 50x50 zeroes

It just creates a flat plane of cubes

terrariaonline.com/threads/…

:D

OK, so it's not 3D?

Christian Frantz

And the Vector3 position from the map is stored in the cubePosition variable which is in my cube constructor

Not technically.

Hold on

{0, 1, 2, 0, 0} Pretend that 50 rows and 50 columns. The higher the number, the higher the cube stacks

2:43 AM

OK, you have a height map.

Christian Frantz

Pretty much. The y value is the height of the cube. x and z are both equal to 50 in this instance

I'm not creating any empty cubes, which I'll eventually need when I get to the point where I have the player start "building" cubes

So, a is solid would look like:

isSolidAt(x,y,z)
return (cubes[x][z] <= y)

Well, if you want the player to be able to build cubes, you're likely going to want something a little more complex than a height map.

Christian Frantz

And that determines if a whole cube is solid right?

Yes

Christian Frantz

Yeah I will eventually. I thought about putting the heightmap into a 3d array and filling the empty spaces with "empty" cubes

2:47 AM

A face is added when one cube is not solid and the one next to it is.

Christian Frantz

Other than manually creating 200 3d arrays, I dont know how else to do it

200 1D arrays you mean.

Well, more than 200.

Christian Frantz

How would I do that with 1D?

Well if the full map is 1000x1000 there would be 200 50x50 chunks to load

Instead of a value being the number of cubes high, it would be a 1D array defining which cubes exist in that column.

Basically a 3D array.

Also, you don't have to create anything manually.

You should look at the source of existing games like this. Techcraft for example.

Christian Frantz

Wow I hate using my neighbors wifi...anyways

3:00 AM

Heh. Dang neighbors and their unreliable wifi.

Christian Frantz

I've looked at every line in techcraft. I don't really find anything that I could use in my game tho

Hmmm. OK. Not even how they're storing and chunking cubes?

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: go next door and demand a refund for this month's service fees :)

Christian Frantz

@SeanMiddleditch I would if I knew which apartment it was coming from!!

@Byte56 Not so much. I figured that using my map and my way of storing chunks would work

But you see you're kind of running into the limitations of that decision right?

Christian Frantz

3:04 AM

Yeah. Obviously I can't keep using my 2D array if I want the player to be able to build eventually. Unless I could use a for loop to fill the empty spaces with empty cubes

The max height would be 50, so if a cube had a height of 5 I could just use for{int i = 0; i > cubeHeight, i++}

A for loop isn't going to know where the empty spaces are without an array

Christian Frantz

and use that to fill the rest with cubes

Well, if you don't care about having overhangs or caves, then you can use your approach.

Christian Frantz

There will be no overhangs or caves in this specific map. It's a valley surrounded by mountains

Actually for this type of gameplay, caves wouldn't even work

OK, and you're not planning on letting the player dig into the landscape or add cubes except on top of other cubes?

Christian Frantz

3:08 AM

Right. The players can only use stone type cubes to build and any type of destruction to the map is caused by attacks or explosions from the player

Which should be easy. Creating a bounding sphere at the center of the explosion and delete any cube within the sphere

That could easily cause overhangs.

Christian Frantz

If they dig into the mountain, then yes. But wouldn't the cubes above just keep their position?

No

Christian Frantz

Why is that? If the player destroys a cube and replaces it with an empty cube it should stay in place I would think

They don't have a position, they're only defined by a number of how many cubes high that column is.

Christian Frantz

3:11 AM

Their position is defined from the map. cubes.Add(new Vector3(x, map[x,z] - y, z)

All the cubes have a position. If they didnt, they wouldnt be able to draw with Matrix translate = translate(cubePosition)

You have a height map and a large list of cube positions?

Christian Frantz

Yeah. Well the positions are stored in the Vector3 cubePosition which every cube has because its part of the cube constructor

Hmm, I really think you should reconsider your data structures.

A 3D array of cubes would solve your problems.

And reduce your memory usage.

Christian Frantz

It would, but keep in mind that I have 200 seperate arrays that I'm defining to create my map. Thats 10,000 individual values that I have to change to get my map to look the way I want it to

Well 10,000 for a 2d array that is

user4704

Bulk refactoring to transition from one code style to another is not fun.

3:18 AM

You're manually editing the values to make your map?

user4704

@ChristianFrantz Data drive that shit, yo.

Wurd

Christian Frantz

Yeah. I have no other way to do it that I know of lol

It's not like I can take a picture of a drawing and use that

And the map won't be random

user4704

load it from a text file at the least.

Better yet.

If you have 10k values

3:21 AM

In game editor

Build a tool.

Christian Frantz

That was actually my first plan. But I quickly realized I didn't know anything about loading files

And I don't know anything about building a map editor either lol

Your wrists will thank you later.

Vaughan, you creepin' on chat?

Sean Middleditch

That should be your number one mantra for everything you do: build a tool.

3:21 AM

Serialization can make it painless.

user4704

@ChristianFrantz Learn.

I'm always around.. in the shadows.

Christian Frantz

From where? That requires a UI

And it doesn't change the fact that I dont know how to cull faces haha

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: Wait, you don't know how to load a file but you can render 3D scenes? Holy Inverted Order of Operations, Batman. :)

user4704

@ChristianFrantz No it doesn't.

3:22 AM

Worry about optimization later.

If he's building a voxel engine, I disagree.

Optimize NOW.

Those things blow.

Well, plan for optimization now :)

I drew my cubes naively when I did one

Christian Frantz

@SeanMiddleditch Yeah this is my first time trying to create an actual game. I've read like 3 books on XNA 2d and a couple for 3d

I got like.. 12FPS

Christian Frantz

3:23 AM

I get 7 when I draw 4 grids of 50x50

Yeah, you have to be smart about voxel engines. Optimize first, you'll regret it otherwise.

I suppose you can optimize a little then.

That shit gets slow, fast.

I built mine in such a way it was pretty painless to optimize, but I can see it being bad.

Sean Middleditch

@VaughanHilts: we're not saying "don't optimize," just put things in order of priority - you can't even reasonably test many optimizations if you can't quickly build scenes that trigger the right cases

3:25 AM

@SeanMiddleditch I agree - but it seems like his experience is.. inverted. He might be scared off if the immediate problem takes 5 years to solve.

Christian Frantz

My goal is to get a few chunks of the map loaded with a good fps before I do anything else to the game

@SeanMiddleditch In this case, I'd solve the immediate problem and backtrack. Ideally, you'd learn all the file IO goodness first, but.. :)

Christian Frantz

Lol I dont think this will take 5 years to solve. But its been frusterating so far :P

Sean Middleditch

@VaughanHilts: fair enough

Christian Frantz

If I can get face culling to work right, I'll have made a lot of progress

And when the time comes that I want to draw a full map, I'll look into building a tool

3:29 AM

Well, I'm off to watch Hunter x Hunter. See all of you later. :)

Later

Anyone have experience with Unity particle systems?

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: are you sure face culling is even the problem? have you measured GPU load vs CPU load? when I see code samples that are calling new to allocate position vectors for every cube, I start to worry.

Why is that a problem if they're on the stack vs. heap?

And once?

Christian Frantz

I have not. But I use an int to measure my draw calls and I'm pretty sure 100,000+ is a bad sign

Sean Middleditch

Yeah, that is

4,000 should be around your max for comfort

Christian Frantz

3:32 AM

I have a method in my cube class that draws the cube, and then a draw method in my main game class that applies the translate matrix to each cube in my cube list

Sean Middleditch

@VaughanHilts: nothing to do with the stack. you can allocate contiguous chunks of memory on the heap rather than individually allocate everything

Christian Frantz

So theres a lot going on

In C#?

Sean Middleditch

yup

Link?

Sean Middleditch

3:32 AM

struct keyword

Well

The vectors are structs..

Sean Middleditch

the vector3 might be a struct, so moot point

lol

That's what I was getting at

Sean Middleditch

thought maybe this was java we were talking about, the "xna" bit should've given it away though :) still, the position should also be implicit to the data structure

:) To my knowledge, every struct in C# is on the stack, and has pretty much no overhead being creatd

created*

Sean Middleditch

3:34 AM

local variable structs are on the stack

structs in a List<> are obviously not on the stack

Well, no.

Sean Middleditch

but they should be in a contiguous chunk of memory rather than individually allocated, so yeah, all's good

Christian Frantz

Byte told me to use a struct to create my cube, but how is that different from using a class in c#?

Classes just have higher overhead

If you only make them once, though it won't affect performance.

(Provided they're stored together)

Christian Frantz

But if I have 2500 cubes, thats 2500 instances of that class

or object in that class rather

3:36 AM

That's not unheard of

Sean Middleditch

a class is individually allocated by itself. a struct is not. so a class could be located anywhere in ram that C# wants to put it, while an array of structs will be tightly packed together. accessing ram is not cheap; it can actually be one of the slowest things on modern CPUs. keeping all your data tightly packed can help a lot with performance

The overhead is minimal - it's a matter of what you're doing with those 2500 objects

I didn't say use a struct to create your cube

Christian Frantz

Hmm well someone said it in one of my questions lol

I did mention data structures, is that what you're thinking?

3:37 AM

A struct is not a good choice for the cube data type

Those are different things.

Struct is misisng a lot of good functionality that you could use

Christian Frantz

Maybe. But I think my problem is with my amount of draw calls that I have

Sean Middleditch

indeed

Have you ran a profiler against it?

Sean Middleditch

3:37 AM

so what part of face culling are you stuck on?

Christian Frantz

I only really need a cube position, and an int or something to store the type

That'll tell ya

Christian Frantz

Well if I'm getting over 100,000 calls then the problem lies there lol

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: if you use a proper data structure like Byte56 suggested, you won't need the position, either. it'll be implicit in the data structure. that's an optimization you really want eventually

Christian Frantz

@SeanMiddleditch I've looked over the pseudocode Byte gave as an answer in one of the questions, and logically it makes sense to me. I just don't know how to compare two sides of a cube to each other, and not draw them if there are indeed two adjacent sides

3:39 AM

Well

You need their individual positions still.

Christian Frantz

If I can get the face culling to lower my amount of draw calls, I'll be happy

If that's the case, why noit read one of the hundres of papers on culling?

Christian Frantz

Each chunk of cubes is put into an index and vertex buffer also

Lol I have seen a lot on culling, I just have trouble implementing the logic into my code

Should I be using DrawIndexedPrimitives for this? I've read that its faster than some of the other draw methods

Sean Middleditch

this goes back to data structures. the result is easy. if you have a cube A, check the position directly above it. if there is no cube there, then the top of A is visible, otherwise it is not. stuff that top face into a list of vertices (pre-translated). repeat for the other 5 sides

Yup.

Draw a diagram.

Of all the combonations.

Then translate those combos to code. Profit??

Hey, this is always something that drove me nuts.

Is there an elegant way to avoid out of bounds in those situations?

Christian Frantz

3:43 AM

@SeanMiddleditch So (x - 1, y, z) in the pseudocode is what youre describing?

This is the answer you should use: gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/28522/…

i.e: doing (x-1, z, z)

And findind out x - 1 is -1

Christian Frantz

I'm pretty much basing everything I'm going to be coding off the answer in that question.

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: sure. that is the position of the cube to the "left", so use that to test if the cube's left face is visible or not. repeat for x+1, y+/-1, and z+/-1

Christian Frantz

But to test if the cubes side is visible, you need the method Byte described earlier and return a bool isSolidAt(x - 1, y, z)

?

3:46 AM

You use the bool to determine what to add

So for example, in the case of the top face one

You do isSolid @ top

If it is, don't add a top face for THAT cub

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: yes. you need a way to test if a cube is at or not at any particular position. hence the desire to use a good data structure

if(isSolid(x, y + 1, z)
addTopFace()

So

Sean Middleditch

!isSolid

Oops.

lol

I said it right in text

Missed the ! in code ;(

Sean Middleditch

paired programming win! :p

Christian Frantz

3:47 AM

@SeanMiddleditch Would I be better off using a different data structure before I go any further in this?

If you plan on surviving in the long run.

Christian Frantz

As long as I can render the full map, I dont care if I survive lol

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: I don't know that you need it now, but you need it eventually. if you can't efficiently implement isSolidAt then yes, you need it now

Then no, you don't need it.

As long as you don't need to

Iterate of every block to find it

Christian Frantz

How would I change what I already have? I've rewritten my cube class like three times lol

3:49 AM

i.e: my entity component system before I used a hash map

Can I see your code?

Before I go watch TV rq

Christian Frantz

If you go to my profile and view some of my questions, you can piece together my whole cube class. Im pretty sure the whole class is actually pasted in one of them

I'm on my laptop so I can't grab it from my other computer unfortunately

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: to start, you wouldn't have a Cube class. you'd most likely just have a 3D array of ints. You don't need a position for each Cube because the index of the cube is its position

2

Q: How can I determine if a cube is adjacent to another cube, and optimize its buffers if so?

I'm trying to optimize the rendering of a collection of cubes, (based on an answer I was given to another question I asked). I understand the logic behind occlusion culling, but I'm having trouble with the code. When I create a cube, I want to determine if that cube is touching another existing ...

Andrew kindly already wrote all the code for you.

Christian Frantz

And this would mean just building the faces around the indexed position?

If you have a 3D array, 0, 0, 0 is at position
(0, 0, 0) * CubeSize

You can literally just multiply the index positions by your cube size

Christian Frantz

3:52 AM

@VaughanHilts Yes he did. I just didn't know how to add faces at that point

I completely forgot about that answer lol

That's exactly what you want and what we've been saying

AddFace would simply.. add the face

Christian Frantz

Yeah and I understand it now lol

I have methods for that as of today

:D

Christian Frantz

I'll give it a shot and report back in a few minutes

@SeanMiddleditch I'm curious now - are objects in lists / hash maps kept together in memory?

Sean Middleditch

3:56 AM

are you clear on what addFace does? you said your Cube class draws itself; better to just add faces into a single list of faces/vertices and then draw them all in a single draw call. down from 100,000+ to 1.

@VaughanHilts: not if they're classes. how would it do that if you allocate an object and then put it into the array? with a struct, it's copied into place, so contiguity can be maintained

Christian Frantz

The addFace method has become my SetUpRightFaceIndices method, which just adds the indices for that face to my indicesToDraw list

Hm.. never really thought of that.

I've never really run into issues with classes being too sporadic to cause issues.

I guess it plays a role in games that need the heavy optimization.

Sean Middleditch

@ChristianFrantz: you can't just add indices, you need individual vertices. that means you need to take the untransformed face, add the current cube's position, and then stuff those into the list. you can still share indices but that's a bit harder to do. i'd avoid index buffers for now

@VaughanHilts: even for apps that only need moderate optimization, iterating over non-contiguous objects is killer on the CPU cache

Hehe.. well I guess shoving a list of entities in a giant list and iterating over them is a bad idea. :)

I think I want to go back and get another degree someday, I wish my undergrad was a math major.

3:59 AM

But thye need to be classes, so what choice do I have :)

Christian Frantz

Ah yikes. I forgot about the vertices.

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