3D Engine and Demo with some nice effects

[BitDragon]

Hi all!

I've been working on a jogl-based 3D engine and demo since summer 2004. My goal was to create visual quality on a Doom3 level, at least in the form of a small demo (the rest is content creation). However, after completing the initial engine and prototype, I had too much commercial work on my plate to continue development. After several months without any progress, I've now decided to release the engine/demo prototype as-is, because I'm unlikely to put any further work into it. I thought that perhaps it would be of interest for some people on this board.

The demo features, for example, normal mapping, particle effects, hardware shadow mapping and complex visibility computations (hierarchy scene graph with obb's). Some parts are not yet correct, for example, the environment does not correctly reflect viewport transforms. However, the basic concepts are there, and a nice walkthrough shows off some effects, including the famous flashlight.

Find the demo at ...

http://www.ascendancy.at/downloads/ascendancy.zip

Some cmall screenshots:





Feel free to mail me with any questions or problems you encounter.

Cheers,

Wolfgang Kienreich
wolf@ascendancy.at
http://wolf.ascendancy.at

--
"I'm a ****ing starship, I'm allowed to cheat."
GCU Arbitrary, Culture Craft

[cborders]

VERY NICE!  Even on my crappy work PC with an onboard graphics card it managed a smooth 35 fps!     And it looked beautiful!  The flashlight was super-sweet!  Great Work!

[EgonOlsen]

Runs with 3fps on a Athlon64 3000+/ATI X800Pro combo. Maybe it's using software rendering for some reason?

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[kappa]

i'd like to test it too but not on windows, could you possibily upload a java web start version? its makes it so much easier and hassle free to test(not to mention for multiple platforms).

[rolz]

Same thing here ~3 FPS on P4-3GHz

[BitDragon]

Sorry for the inconveniences.

The 3fps thing is surely related to the engine running in software rendering. I tested on my home machine (Dual-Xeon/GT6600/WinXP) and on one of our office machines (P4/9600Pro/WinXP). Perhaps software rendering is due to problems allocating all the required caps, including hardware shadow mapping. You could try using a newer version of jogl.

I'll do a webstart version this week, and repost it here.

Cheers,

Wolfgang Kienreich
wolf@ascendancy.at
http://wolf.ascendancy.at

--
"I'm a ****ing starship, I'm allowed to cheat."
GCU Arbitrary, Culture Craft

[BitDragon]

Hi all,

i just recompiled the Ascendancy demo against the latest jogl builds (*not* the jsr beta), this should fix some issues people encountered. Still, Java 1.5 is required. Download from the old location, http://www.ascendancy.at/downloads/ascendancy.zip

Cheers,

Wolfgang Kienreich
wolf@ascendancy.at
http://wolf.ascendancy.at

--
"I'm a ****ing starship, I'm allowed to cheat."
GCU Arbitrary, Culture Craft

[EgonOlsen]

Still the same...well, not exactly. I'm getting 4fps now...
Anyway, it IS using hardware rendering, because driver settings (AA, SmartShader...) affects it. It's just dog slow for whatever reason...

[Spasi]

Try disabling/resetting one or more of the below, if you're using them:

AA lines, AA points, wide lines, wide points, line stipple, polygon stipple and polygon offset.

[Matlu]

Nice Runs at 60 fps here  (2.4GHz Celeron / FX-5500 / WinXp)

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[laserdude45]

just a bit over 90 fps here

[Malohkan]

Intel Integrated Graphics does NOT like this haha.  Rendering the sky seems ok.  When I turn to face the mesh, it's dog slow and jerky and there's more rendering errors than I've ever seen in a program.  It looks really trippy and buggy and all out of whack.  Guess I need a real video card... 

[g666]

Intel Integrated Graphics does NOT like this haha.  Rendering the sky seems ok.  When I turn to face the mesh, it's dog slow and jerky and there's more rendering errors than I've ever seen in a program.  It looks really trippy and buggy and all out of whack.  Guess I need a real video card... 

I get the same here. I have a geforce4mx.

[Vorax]

Malohkan and g666 -  It sounds like your cards don't have the level of shader support required for this demo.

[BitDragon]

Malohkan and g666 -  It sounds like your cards don't have the level of shader support required for this demo.

Exactly. Forget running this baby on the infamous Intel Extreme internal series of cards. Ascengine makes heavy use of projective texturing and hardware shadow mapping and these cards don't support it, so everything is emulated and slooow. As for the GF4MX, now that's a GF2 with another label tagged on (I know the story, my laptop has one) and this model, too, does not support the required extensions.

A good test is downloading an old SplinterCell demo (one of the first games which really went into projective texturing and shadow mapping): If it runs smoothly, so will Ascengine. One example: I have been unable to get decent framerates for it on the Intel Extreme "powered" 2GHz Celeron my girls use for homework (which actually is a good thing, otherwise they would probably fall in love with Sam Fisher ) However, since I installed a 9200 Radeon PCI card and disabled the onboard card, everything runs okay, including Harry Potter, which they, to my great  relief, prefer to good old Sam.

Bottom line: Small demo, but hardware requirement like the big guys, sorry. Minimum GF3 (arb_depth_texture and arb_shadow support), better true GF4 (both fully accellerated).

Cheers

Wolfgang

"I'm a ****ing starship, I'm allowed to cheat!"
GCU Arbitrary, Culture Craft

[zulo]

160 fps with ati radeon9800pro

[stramit]

404 for me (i'm interested in checking it out)

[Amos Wenger]

Excuse me I'm slightly off-topic :

As for the GF4MX, now that's a GF2 with another label tagged on (I know the story, my laptop has one) and this model, too, does not support the required extensions.

What to buy now as a graphic card for gaming / gaming development ? I have a pretty small budget, although I don't want to fall in another trap like the GeForce 4 MX 440 SE (even worse than the Geforce4 MX 440 !!!)..

I saw (reviews on the Internet) the Geforce 6600LE was pretty good and cheaper than the 6600 cause of another hw technology used (reducing production costs).

I want something nVidia because of their great support for Linux.

However if you know an ATi card well supported under Linux then tell me.

Thanks in advance.