nGENE Tech for C#

I'm really excited to announce that thanks to Amer Koleci nGENE Tech is now available for the SlimDX and C#. I hope that in future it will be possible to use it with XNA and thus make games for XBox and Windows Phone 7.

You can download it from here, here (RARed version) or get current version from SVN (SVN version misses media files). It comes with a simple demo. Hope you like it!

For using it you will also need SlimDX runtime.

Also be sure to check new nGENE Tech 0.1.7.0 from the repository.

nGENE Tech 0.1.6.4

Since RC1 release a few weeks back I fixed a lot of stuff (special thanks to David, Jose and Zoran here for pointing this bugs out) and added a few smaller things including eg.:

• [FIX] Soft particles are now a bit softer
• [FIX] Fixes in HDR (regarding luminance computing)
• [FIX] MeshLoadPolicyCollada is now working for static collada meshes
• [FIX] Fixed bugs in picking
• [ADD] Collision notifications for character controller/scene and character controller/character controller collisions
• [ADD] Particle deflectors (planes deflecting particles). Call ParticleEmitter::addDeflector(const PARTICLE_DEFLECTOR& _deflector) to add new deflector to the emitter
• [ADD] Framework::drawAxisRods() method drawing object's coordinate system axes
• [ADD] PrefabCylinder - cylinder
• [ADD] PrefabPyramid - pyramid
• [ADD] PrefabArrow - arrow
• [ADD] PrefabAxisRods - 3 orthogonal axes pointing representing coordinate space
• [ADD] Torus prefab - PrefabTorus class
• [ADD] Framework::pick(float _x, float _y, bool _perTriangle) - takes additional optional (false by default) _perTriangle argument. Setting it to true will make picking triangle accurate
• [ADD] All prefabs parameters can be now changed on run-time - not only on creation

BTW always up to date release notes are available here.

nGENE Tech SDK 0.1.6

After quite a long time there is another SDK distribution of nGENE - this time coming with all (I hope) required redistributables so there shouldn't be as many crashes as previously :) . It contains binaries, samples, tutorials, class reference and full source code.

Although it is still RC1 version, the code will be subject to only small changes. The most of the bugs I predict could be related to missing dlls or media files, not working shortcuts creation in the installer and stuff like that.

There's no point in listing changes since version 0.1 as this list would be just too long - almost everything have changed since then.

The download is available here.

I also hope to post some nice news about nGENE soon.

nGENE update... at last

Ok, I've just committed to the SVN repository. Current version is 0.1.5 and you can download it from trunk or from this address:


http://svn2.assembla.com/svn/ngene/tags/version-0.1.5


The list of changes is pretty long... a lot of fixes and improvements. The biggest addition is definitely animation system with skeletal animation and animation blending. It is still buggy and code is still ugly (cleaning it takes much more time than anticipated) but I will work hard on it starting from next week. From next week I will also start to work on more advanced animation techniques like ragdoll and inverse kinematics.


Also SDK (with installer, exes and ready to use dlls) will be made available in two weeks time (I hope to release it next weekend but who knows what will happen during the week...).


WARNING: if you use Visual Studio 2008 or newer you have to open project for VS 2005. This is because at my current computer I have no VS 2008/2010 installed... I will fix it soon.

Lightnings and render techniques

Yet another update:

* Introduction of material techniques
* Lightning bolt effect
* Surfaces can now custom shadow material instead of default. Just add technique with the name "shadow" to the base surface material (see palm_bark or palm_leaf in default.lib for example)

* [fix] Vegetation shadows
* [fix] Fixed bug with display modes
* [fix] Bounding boxes of some objects were invalid

* [example] Lightning bolt

The most important thing is the first point i.e. material techniques. Now material doesn't directly contain RenderPass objects but instead RenderTechnique's (similar to DX FXs or OGRE for instance). For now technique is just a simple object but I plan to use it for some materials LOD later on and yet it helped me to solve some problem with shadows casted by objects animated using vertex shaders (see palm_bark material for the example of custom shadowing routine).

By default the first technique is set as active (i.e. one used in rendering) but you can change it using Material::setActiveRenderTechnqiue(RenderTechnique* _technique) or providing index.

There are besides some fixes of course and addition of new example (lightning bolts) and new effect lightnings. You can see it in action below:



and below:



There are still some tweaks to do but in general it is working ok. You can read about the algorithm on my blog. I also recently provided detailed description of Virtual File System there.

A lot of changes

- very basic sound support (using FMOD but it is sufficient to provide simple wrapper to use something else)
- it is now possible to listen to collision events
- night vision effect
- improved bump mapping effects
- added some mixing comments

- [fix] it is no longer possible to add two child nodes with same name
- [fix] factories are no longer registered in enumerators in constructors... that was just foolish!
- [fix] engine is started after displaying config window... not before
- [fix] static shadows fix
- [fix] fixed bug in thermal vision effect
- [fix] many minor bug fixes

- [example] user can now control SSAO effect in SSAO sample (for me radius ~0.2 and range ~50.0 looks best)
- [example] sound example presenting use of much more than 3D sounds... check it for some interesting nGENE features :)

Virtual File System support

From now on nGENE Tech has Virtual File System built-in. To ease building resource files there is provided a command line tool named ArchiveBuilder.exe (you will find it in the nGENE/bin/release folder) which typical usage is as follows:

Usage: archivebuilder [directory] [target file] [-c OPTIONAL compression]

You can also build archives from within code (see the VFS example for details on how to do that).

VFS supports compression (using Burrows-Wheeler Transform + Move-To-Front + Run-Length Encoding + Huffman Coding algorithms) and is pretty transparent for the programmer. See this post on nGENE forums or the VFS example for more details and example of usage.

Besides to make debugging a bit easier I changed configuration of nGENE demos.

Another change is that you can now follow nGENE improvements on Twitter (see widget on this page).