Nerve demo system

A short update (and Evoke 2011)

2011-08-08T22:33:00.000+02:00

Wow, my last post is already a year old. Time for a short update. A lot of personal things have happened since then, so I haven't really been able to work on my home projects. One of the reasons is my new job as a game programmer at Guerrilla Games.Which is in Amsterdam, which is quite far away.

But anyway, I'm going to the Evoke demoparty in Köln, Germany, next weekend. Izard is working hard on a 64k demo, although I haven't been able to help him with that. So I'm not sure how that's going to work out :)

The good news is that I'll hopefully have more spare time to work on my home projects again now that I found an appartment closer to work.

Lots of improvements for Pandora

2010-08-15T22:50:00.000+02:00

With only two weeks left before Evoke starts I'm currently working hard on adding some new stuff to our software synthesizer, Pandora. For our new 64k demo Izard wants to create a soundtrack that's a bit different than the ones for our previous releases, so we made a list of features and improvements that should make it possible. One of the biggest things on the list was a complete overhaul of the mixer. We already had a basic 16-channel mixer since the beginning (we started Pandora about 3 years ago), but it was about time for some improvements.

Anyway, here are some pictures of Pandora's current state. The system consists of a VST plugin (of which the GUI is shown in the screenies), and a runtime playback library. Both are written in pure C++. And the VST is actually just a wxWidgets-powered GUI on top of the playback library.

Please note that I haven't spent much time on the GUI. It is intentionally kept ugly, because I currently rather focus on adding new features. When that's more or less stable, I'm probably going to replace the current look by a fancy skinned style.

So that's what I'm currently working on.

Ohw and I'm also actively looking around for a new job now. Playlogic, the game development studio that I've worked for the past two years, went bankrupt two weeks ago. Had a great time there, so it's kind of sad. But on the bright side it does give me lots of spare time to prepare for Evoke :)

Textures and shaders in maya

2010-07-23T22:47:00.000+02:00

I said I was going to give some info and images of the GUI side of Texo, my new texture generator library, but I think a short video will make it even clearer. And that way I won't have to write a 10 pages blog post about it :)

So that's Maya 2008 with a single 3d viewport rendered by Nerve in realtime, where I use Materialist, my integrated material and texture editor to modify/create shaders and see them change in realtime in my viewport.

The video is just a short demonstration of some of the features of my material and texture system. But it should give a good idea of the workflow and level of integration with my demosystem and Maya itself. I already wrote Materialist and its shader graph editor some time ago, but its Textures tab where you can create texture graphs the same way as you can create shader graphs is brand new.

Anyway, I think I'll make more videos of nerve and some of its components in the future. It says so much more than words :)

A new texture generator

2010-07-22T23:17:00.000+02:00

Hmm, my last post is already from a few months ago, when we released our last 64k intro, Exo. In the meantime I've been working slowly on some improvements on nerve. The biggest thing I've been working on is a new texture generator library. I have been using my own texture generator engine (which is called Gentex) for about 4 years now.Which makes it the oldest component of my demo system.

Over the years I've been improving it, but it never really converged to anything awesome. Its codebase is huge (it consumes 8kb of uncompressed bytes of Exo), it sacrifices a lot of precision since it uses 8bit per component bitmaps internally, its GUI is separated from my shader development tool, making the creation of shaders a very laberous task, and only very basic and elementary nodes/effects are implemented.

So I'm currently working on a brand new texture engine, dubbed Texo. It consists of a simple static lib, which is used to generate a texture by iteratively applying generators and effects on bitmaps, and a GUI part, which is used to author/design the textures.

For the first time I've been actively keeping an eye on the final uncompressed filesize. For Gentex I never performed any file size measurements, mostly out of laziness. But for Texo's static library I've started doing this, and it has been quite rewarding. At the moment my lib only occupies 2kb of space when all features are used. That's already a lot smaller than Gentex; but note that not all of Gentex' features has been implemented yet. To get to such a small lib, I've been actively using SSE. Using C++ SSE intrinsics turned out to deliver both small and fast code. Another nice side effect is that it was relatively easy to use 32bit per component floating point bitmaps. That improved the precision of the textures, and assured simpler code; no more bitshifting and masking; no more inefficient conversions between floats and chars.

I'm doing all file size measurements using a custom IDA script. IDA is a really nice disassembler/debugger which can be automated using self-written scripts. So I've made a test application that links with Texo and uses all of its features, and a simple IDA script that opens my .exe and dumps out a list of all functions and their code-sizes to a text file. This way I can easily get the actual size of every function in my final executable. There might be easier ways of achieving this, but for me this method works awesomely great :)

Next to the static library of Texo, I've also been working on the GUI part. It's currently simply integrated into Materialist, which should make creating new shaders and/or textures much easier. But I'll tell more about that some other time. I really want to show some pictures of the new GUI, but that would make this post a bit too long.

For the upcoming weeks I'm planning on adding new things to Texo, and further integrating the system with the rest of Nerve. And I have a huge list of cool improvements for Pandora, our software synthesizer, that Izard likes to have in, so that's something I'll be working on too.

Ohw, and the Evoke demoparty is already appearing at the horizon. Only one month to go...

A video of Exo

2010-05-03T17:43:00.000+02:00

Here's a video of Exo. Watch it with your sound turned on:

Exo released

2010-05-02T20:03:00.003+02:00

I'm just back from the Outline 2010 demoparty in Eersel (near Eindhoven), and it was really fun again. We'd been working hard on our entry for the 64k demo competition; the same demo that we weren't able to finish on time for Breakpoint, a month ago. But this time we did pull it off. The result is a 64k demo called Exo, and we actually won the intro competition again with it (just like last year). Woohoo.

It is the first demo that we made with our new version of nerve (with lots of cool new stuff in it). And once again we used pandora, our software synthesizer, to play the soundtrack. All direction, music and some of the graphics were done by Izard, and I did all coding and the rest of the graphics.

And, yeah, if we´d only had more time we could´ve improved it much more. It´s still very unpolished in certain places.

For now I can only post some small screenshots, and a download link. But as soon as my internet connection is back online again, I´ll post a captured video.

Download Exo at Pouet.net (you´ll need a reasonably good graphics card and a recent version of DirectX to run it).

Working on a leader intro

2010-04-11T20:50:00.000+02:00

The past few evenings I've been working on a leader sequence that we can use for our next 64k intro. It's still very rough, and there's no sound yet, but I think it already looks kinda nice. It's a relatively simple scene (2 shaders, 1 cube mesh, 1 camera and 1 light) and I'm estimating it to add max 1kb to our final filesize:

... and back again

2010-04-07T20:42:00.000+02:00

I'm back again from Breakpoint. Actually yesterday already, but I didn't have much time to post something. But, anyway, Breakpoint was really fun again; although we didn't manage to finish our 64k demo. Izard and I worked on it for quite some time at the party, but there was simply too much work to do. And because we 'forgot' to get a hotel room for the first night, we also didn't get much sleep that first night either. So that didn't help much either...

Luckily the Outline demoparty is already starting in about 3 weeks, so we'll continue our work on our demo and release it at that party.

Ohw, and I really enjoyed the various competitions at Breakpoint. Especially these entries rocked:

Agenda circling forth, by Fairlight and CNCD (full size demo, winner of PC demo competition)
Rove, by Farbrausch (full size demo, 2nd place at PC demo competition)
Imagine, by TGGC, CodingCat and BluFlame (64k demo, winner of 64k competition)

Packing bags for Breakpoint 2010

2010-04-01T20:11:00.000+02:00

Okay, time's up. Tomorrow starts Breakpoint 2010. Izard and I have been working on our entry the last two weeks, but as usual we haven't actually finished our entry yet. At the moment we only have our soundtrack more or less done, and (nearly) all of our tech. And Izard has already done some modeling. And best of all, we have a plan/design. So that means that once again, we'll have to build the actual 64k intro live at the party place. The good thing though is that a) we booked a hotel, so we can properly crash/sleep somewhere and b) the deadline is at sunday morning, giving us two full days to finish it. Should be enough...

Anyway, I'm going to pack my bags now. Wish me luck! And btw, you can follow everything live at http://bptv.untergrund.net/.

Next stop: Breakpoint 2010

2010-03-21T13:58:00.000+01:00

In two weeks I'll be going to the Breakpoint demoparty again (in Bingen, Germany), so I'm currently working hard on our demosystem again to get everything ready on time. This year's Breakpoint is kind of special, since it will be the last one being organized. Which is sad, and another reason for us to try to release a 64k demo there.

Anyway, the clock is ticking and (as usual) I still have way too many things to do. We're going to use nerve2 for our release, which is a completely rewritten version of our demo system. But it's still far from a shippable state...

Filtered SSAO

2010-01-18T23:17:00.004+01:00

Here's a new screenie of my SSAO implementation. I've added some gaussian blurring and that really seems to work nicely.

The left image is lit+AO, in the middle is AO only and the right image shows lit only. My next target is to eliminate some artefacts, and tweak the blurring a bit more.

Struggling with SSAO

2010-01-14T22:43:00.005+01:00

After struggling for several nights I've finally managed to get SSAO more or less working. Here's a work in progress screenie:

I still need to implement some filtering, and the settings need some tweaking, but it already seems to do its job. After that is done, I'll have to take a look at the performance and shader size. Atm it's a bit bloated :)

Best wishes for 2k10

2010-01-06T22:54:00.006+01:00

Hi, just wanted to post something, as a sign of still being life. The last few months I've been working in my sparse spare time on some new tech for nerve. And I'm currently trying out some approaches for SSAO. Here's a first screenie of SSAO in action, it's my very first step, and it still needs lots of tweaking and improvements... but I'm already starting to like it!

* Btw, this is an untweaked implementation of SSAO as described here.

No visit to Evoke this year...

2009-08-02T21:52:00.002+02:00

Evoke 2009 started last friday without Izard and me. We really wanted to go again this year, but we just didn't have the time for it. Izard is working hard to finish his own house, and I am really busy with work... I even had to work last saturday.

If everything goes according to schedule, both Izard and I should have enough spare time in september again :) So I'll be picking up my nerve work then where I left it off. (I was already working on lots of new stuff, but more on that later)

Scatterpillar released!

2009-05-24T21:15:00.004+02:00

Wow! Outline was really nice this year. Izard and I worked hard on our 64k intro and we managed to complete it (kind of) on time without too much stress (well only a little bit). And to make it even better: we actually won the PC demo competition with it! Which was really nice. This is probably the first 64k intro that we made of which we're more or less satisfied with the endresult.

The little bit of stress that we had was caused by our issue with the file size limit. About 1 hour before the deadline we were still stuck at an (compressed) executable file size of 70kb. By removing some unused parts of code I was able to decrease this to 68kb, and luckily Izard was able to decrease this even further to 64kb by removing various polygons from our models.

Our new 64k is called Scatterpillar, and can be downloaded from it's pouet.net page. You can also download a higher resolution video there.

Izard did the soundtrack (using our Pandora software synth), he did all the modeling (using subdiv'ed low-polygon meshes) and all direction. I worked on the code, all the shading and the overlays.

Here's a captured video:

Anyway, we're already looking forward to our next release. I'm working on some brand new tech, and Izard is already working on some cool designs.

Outline here we come

2009-05-22T11:32:00.002+02:00

I'm currently packing my bags for my trip to Outline '09. Izard and I have been working on our 64k release (the one we couldn't release at Breakpoint last month), and it looks like we're going to finish it on time. Which would be nice :)

Breakpoint was nice, but....

2009-04-19T17:13:00.002+02:00

.... but we didn't manage to release anything. When we arrived at friday afternoon we still had a lot of things to do on our 64k entry. So we worked hard (nearly non-stop) until the deadline sunday afternoon, but we weren't able to finish something decent in time. We simply didn't have all content ready (everything was still very rough and unpolished), and to make it worse, it didn't even fit in 64 kilobytes... it was around 77kb.

Our new plan is to release this 64k demo at Outline 2009, which is a smaller demoparty helt in a few weeks. We should have enough time to finish it up properly.

Anyway, despite not releasing a demo, Breakpoint was really nice. The party, the entries, the hotel. Everything :)

ps. Check out Elevated, this years winner of the 4k competition.

Preparing for Breakpoint 09

2009-04-08T20:26:00.002+02:00

Well, just wanted to post a small update. Quite some time has already gone by since my previous post. I've been working on some completely new tech for nerve (but more on that in some other post) and I've been working on improving our software synthesizer Pandora for our next production, which we hope to release next weekend at Breakpoint 09.

Last year's visit to Breakpoint was quite nice, so we decided to pay another visit this year. But this time we're going to stay for the whole weekend, and we're actually going to release something there.

Anyway, there's still a lot of work to be done. Hopefully we'll manage to bring it all nicely together before the deadline (which is next Saturday in the morning).

A tiny bit of news

2008-10-16T20:18:00.004+02:00

It's probably time for a small update, since a few things happened since my previous post... I'll try to summarize them in chronological order :)

Somewhere halfway last month, September, I took the step to look for a new job. I had been working at Coded Illusions for 3 years, and since our game project Nomos was cancelled halfway August, I thought it was a good moment to switch lanes. So I arranged an appointment at Playlogic Game Factory through an ex-colleague (Koert) who works there. They offered me a job as a programmer on their project Fairytale Fights, and after thinking it over in the weekend, I decided to accept the offer and start on the 1st of November. Enough time to hand over my tasks. So I thought...

About two weeks after that it was announced that our salaries at Coded Illusions wouldn't get paid anymore, that our investors would immediately stop investing, and that within weeks the company would most likely file for bankruptcy. One of the reasons of the investors to withdraw was that due to the recent financial problems it was getting really hard to maintain the company.

Around the same time I've heard that this year's Demozone party, the party for which Izard and I made an invitation 64k intro, was cancelled. Again, due to financial problems related to the current worldwide financial instability.

I was planning on going to Demozone this year, and I was already working on a 4 kilobyte demo called "Coplanarity". It's a minimalistic vector art intro. I've made a designer tool for it, and a playback engine which currently fits in 2kb of packed code. So I'm still within budget; enough room for a tiny software synth and some content. Anyway, here's a small video of a scene in my designer tool. The whole intro will probably consist of such scenes (built up out of animated vector art).

Anyway, I started my job at Playlogic Gamefactory today (instead of November 1st) :)

Demozone 2008 invitation released

2008-08-11T20:57:00.003+02:00

Okay, I'm back from Germany, from Evoke 2008. We had plans to release both a 64k demo and a 64k invitation for Demozone (a Dutch demo party that's helt in november in Utrecht), but in the end we only managed to finish the invitation for Demozone. We didn't have much prepared so we had to do almost everything at the party place. So we tried to keep our demo really simple and short.

Here's a video of the demo. It's quite short (around 1:30), and we didn't release it as "Inque", but as "False Idols", since we weren't quite satisfied with the result. The name "False Idols" was inspired by this release, which is a 64k demo that was released last week, and probably one of the best since years.

Anyway, we got ranked 3rd place in the 64k competition, out of 5 entries. Which is something we're pretty satisfied with. I think the demo looked quite okay, but was simply too short and simple. But that's something we could've only done better by taking more time... or simply planning better :)

You can download our release here on pouet.net, you can also find a full HD video there and read other people's comments.

ps. This is our first release with some new tech in it. It uses subdivided polygonal meshes for the "demozone" model, precalculated ambient occlusion for the soft shadows on the models and more advanced postprocess effects (a fish-eye postprocess effect and a rgb-separation postprocess effect).

Off to Evoke 2008

2008-08-07T10:13:00.003+02:00

Tomorrow Izard and I are travelling to Köln, Germany, for Evoke 2008. We've been there last year and it was actually quite nice, and we won the 64k competition which made it a bit nicer too ;).

This time we're staying the whole weekend, and we're planning on releasing some (multiple) things there too.

Gradient texture support

2008-07-20T22:42:00.004+02:00

Just wanted to post a small video of a scene that uses a new feature that I've added: gradient textures. You can have variable gradients (with multiple colors), just like Photoshop has them. But only linear gradients (no support for angular, diamond, etc...).

And here's a screenshot of all the tools in action that are used for this effect (including the new gradient editor):

Ohw and I'm currently working on dynamic (physics-like) cables. Those will probably be the key-dynamic elements in our Evoke demo, and it'll probably also be the last core feature I'm working on, before starting on the demo itself.

Mesh subdivision added

2008-07-19T22:20:00.002+02:00

Okay, I've finally implemented mesh subdivision. To be precise, I've implemented Loop's subdivision algorithm. It took a bit longer than expected, since I was trying to implement the wrong algorithm ;)

Anyway, it works great, and it really hides almost all of the geometry artifacts caused by the lossy compression of the vertices. The added screenshots are of the same polygonal model as in my previous post, but this time with 1 iteration of the subvision algorithm performed (quadrupling the polycount).

Polygonal meshes

2008-07-14T20:33:00.003+02:00

Here are some shots of a new feature I've been working on (and still am): polygonal meshes. I wasn't supporting polygonal objects before since they can really claim a lot of precious bytes, but Izard really needed them for his plans for our new intro. Luckily I didn't have to invent everything myself, since I found two really great sources of info on how to pack/compress such polygonal objects as efficient as possible: Iq's discussion of his technology from the 195/95/256 64k demo, and ryg's presentation of how to code compressor-friendly.

Anyway I'm currently using several tricks to minimize the required space: polygon strips, only storing vertex positions and indices (regenerating normals and automapping uv's at loadtime), quantizizing vertex positions to 8bit per component, delta encoding all values, and reordering streams per component. And it seems to help a lot. I've been able to store a 19800 triangle/9902 vertices sphere into 74000 bytes, which compressed to 4520 bytes. Which is good enough, since I'll be having objects op 1k triangles max probably. (But the achieved compression ratio does vary per object, since it depends on used topology and geometry.)

There are two things I still have to implement though: auto UV generation and mesh subdivision (just like Maya's subdivs), for smoother surfaces without having to store all the polies. Both will be done at load-time.

A little bit more ambient occlusion

2008-07-07T21:05:00.002+02:00

Here are some screenies of another testscene with Ambient Occlusion turned on. AO is precalculated on the GPU and in this scene it's combined with dynamic lighting.

I had been working on AO a few months ago, but still hadn't taken the time to polish the code and make it actually functional. So now that I've done that we can use it in our next releases. It already looks quite cool in my testscenes, I'm wondering how it will look in larger scenes...

Seiryoku is released

2008-07-03T20:36:00.005+02:00

Okay we've done it, we've submitted our entry to the Intel Demo Competition 2008. We actually submitted it tuesday morning already, but the competition website wasn't active until yesterday.

Anyway, our demo is called Seiryoku, and it's actually the first full-sized demo we made so far. With a size limit of 64mb you can simply do a lot more than the 64kb restriction we're used to. So we planned right from the start to make our demo different than our 64kb intros. For this reason I've been very busy on building a custom demo engine called nerveHD. I've taken quite some days off from work to code a bit on nerveHD. But it still took a lot more effort than expected.

Our final result for the competition was more or less rushed together, to at least have something submitted. At the time of the deadline we actually didn't have any overlays and fading done, and we were still missing several models. Luckily we were granted some extra time to at least add those basic things to make it all look a bit more decent. (thanks tobi!)

But in the end, we're not that proud of this release. It could have been much better, if we'd simply had planned and scheduled things better. In the end we didn't have time to use our dynamic shadows, the dynamic/skinned cables, the posteffects and the morphing objects, for example. But on the other side: it was a really cool project for a really cool competition. We did a few things we hadn't done before, such as using polygonal models (instead of generating them from primitives), using prebaked global illumination (instead of using a simple realtime model) and using manually made textures (instead of generating them).

Ohw, and about the name of the demo: "Seiryoku" is Japanese for "influence; power; might; strength; potency; force; energy" which sounds oriental and also covers our demo quite nicely.

Please check out our entry and all other entries (which are really of top quality) for the Intel Demo Competition online at http://www.intel-demoscene.de. Since this is an online competition, you can also vote for your favourite entry at the same site.

Our entry can also be found at pouet.net (including user comments and download links) and I've also added a small video below:

That's it for now. We already started work on two new projects for the next upcoming party: Evoke 2008, held from August 8 to 10 in Köln, Germany.

Almost there...

2008-06-25T21:12:00.005+02:00

The deadline for the Intel Demo Competition is almost there... Next Monday will be the day. Izard and I are still working on our entry; we still have lots of stuff to do. But we're used to rushing things at the last moment ;)

Anyway, just a few more days are left. We have pinned down the scenes (more or less), we have the time (a few days off from work), we have the tech (although buggy...) and we have the music (although not finished yet). Now all we need to do is finish everything up, put it together and add a great deal of polish and styling :)

Ohw and I'll post a video and screenies of our demo as soon as we finish it.

nerveHD's first steps

2008-05-18T20:27:00.003+02:00

The last 1 / 2 weeks I've been working on the demo system that we're going to use for our full size demo for the Intel democompetition and I just wanted to post some info of it's current state here. The difference with this demo and all our previous demos is that we don't have any size constraints this time. Therefore our "nerve" demosystem in its current form is not quite useful, it simply lacks all the basic things you need for full sized demos. Things like 3d models, textures and mp3 audio are not supported by nerve. Well at least not pre-generated.

So I'm working on a spin-off engine for our new demo: nerveHD. HD, since it will be capable of handling more complex things than nerve is capable of. It is integrated into Maya, just like nerve, using a viewport rendering interface, and it uses COLLADA for all its data transfer. Its rendering system is a pimped version of Nerve's rendering system.

I still have a lot of things to implement, but I have the basic systems up and running now. It can already process COLLADA scenes correctly and render them inside Maya, as you can see in the screenshot.

Some things still underway are: animation support, HDR, skinning, particles, overlays and (soft) shadows. That's the plan at least.

Intel Demo Competition 2008

2008-05-08T22:18:00.005+02:00

Wow, something really unexpected just happened... I just received the confirmation that Inque will be competing in the Intel Demo Competition this year. We're one of the 4 teams that will be competing against last years' winner Still.

Our entry (a full-size demo, not a 64k) will have to be ready on the 30th of June. We'll receive a Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme pc for free, and if we manage to actually win the competition (which will be hard, since this competition has always had top quality entries) we receive 4 more of those.

Anyway, there goes our schedule for our 64k for Evoke and all our free time. But this is going to be really fun :)

Wrecked Angle released at Outline 2008

2008-05-04T20:06:00.005+02:00

We just came back from Outline 2008 (in Braamt/NL) where we have released a new 64k production: Wrecked Angle. It's our first release that uses our own softsynth (pandora) instead of v2 that we used before, and it's also our first release with the new shading pipeline of nerve. All this new tech assured me that I've had enough bugs to fix in the past days. Izard and I have been working quite hard the past week to get everthing together. Pandora was full of little ("this setting should have an exponential range") and big ("omg, everything is out of sync?!") bugs.

Anyway, we've been working on this release from wednesday last week right until the deadline yesterday evening, six o'clock. We even had to work through the night yesterday, and skip the sleeping part, to get everything working. But we did manage to fix it all up into a final release were we're more or less proud of. It is actually more "polished" than our previous releases.

Ohw and for this demo Izard again did the soundtrack (but this time using our own synth pandora, instead of the dull v2 synth) and I took care of the coding, visuals and direction.

The release can be found here: Wrecked Angle on pouet.net, or check out the video I captured of it:

Ohw and Outline 2008 was really fun, despite the fact that we didn't even reach into the top 3 with our entry. Which was kind of weird, we hoped for a higher rank.

Anyway: this was more or less a first step into the direction we want to go. Were going to advance our soundengine a bit further, and we also need some improvements to our graphics system. Next stop: Evoke 2008.

Back from BP08

2008-03-25T20:54:00.003+01:00

BP was great, although we didn't win the 64k award. We kind of expected that already.

One thing I rather liked was Bonzaj' (from the Polish demogroup Plastic) seminar on his demo engine "picoEngine", which is totally integrated into Maya. A year ago I already found some info on their engine. And it really looks a lot like nerve, although I have to admit that their engine appears to be set up a bit more professionally :) Anyway, he also showed a scene from their newest production for PS3, which is being sponsored by Sony: Linger in the Shadows.

Next stop: Outline 2008, first week of May.

Off to Breakpoint 08

2008-03-21T21:50:00.003+01:00

I'm currently packing my bags for tomorrow's trip to Breakpoint 08 in Germany, which is a huge (one of the biggest in Europe) demoparty. It won't be a regular party visit, since we're primarily going there to visit the awards show saturday night. We don't have anything to release there, as we usually have. I was working on a small 4k intro though, but it will surely not be finished on time for the deadline.

Anyway, looking forward to it already :)

AO in action

2008-03-13T20:40:00.002+01:00

Here's a video of a testscene I made yesterday. I was playing around a bit with AO and I thought it looked cool:

Some stats: 1 lightsource (only for specular highlights), 2 shaders, 1 posteffect (for extra contrast), 32000 polygons and calculation of per vertex lightmap took 2 seconds.

Occluding the ambiance

2008-03-11T22:15:00.004+01:00

The past few days I've been experimenting with integrating static / precalculated lighting into Nerve, and I just wanted to drop some images I have so far. I've been focussing on Ambient Occlusion, and I'm currently using a hardware (GPU) based technique for precalculating per-vertex AO amounts as described here. This technique was also used (as far as I can tell) by RGBA's 64k '195/95/256'. The results so far seem quite promising, it appears to be quite fast and with some filtering/smoothing the visual results are quite okay. So it could be a quite useful addition to Nerve's lighting model. But I still have to figure out how to handle dynamic/deforming objects, since precalculated lighting won't quite work there.

I do have another alternative, which seems quite cool too: SSAO, which is just a (quite heavy) postprocess effect applying a form of local ambient occlusion. Anyway, that's probably still a bit too hard, so for now I'll stick to precalculated, static, AO lighting.

ps. calculating the AO lighting for the scene in the images above took around 1 second. For around 20k vertices.

Antiphore best 64k of 2007?

2008-03-02T19:23:00.003+01:00

Yesterday Izard and I both received the following email from scene.org:

We are happy to inform you that your production, Antiphore, has been nominated for an award for 'best 64k intro'.

We invite you to take part in the prize giving ceremony that will take place at the Breakpoint demoparty, on the 22nd of March 2008 in Bingen am Rhein - Germany. All the nominees will receive a diploma, and the winners in each category will get a prize statue.

So, against the odds, we're nominated for creating the best 64k intro for 2007. The other 4 contestants in our category are already made public, and by looking at those I don't think we'll actually win the statue (which looks really cool btw). But then again, the fact that we're nominated is already more than we could have hoped for. This is especially true, when looking at last years' nominees in the 64k category.

Anyway, we're definitely going to the ceremony (which is already in 3 weeks), and probably spend some time at Breakpoint. Which is one of the biggest demo parties in Europe.

Btw, more info on these "Scene awards" can be found here.

Just a test...

2008-02-25T21:43:00.002+01:00

Just wanted to post a small 15 second scene I made yesterday. I was experimenting with the new post effects and shaders stuff, and I think it actually looks kinda cool :) (Ohw and I captured it to a higher resolution video, no more Youtube "quality" vids from now on...)

Postprocessing support

2008-02-03T20:22:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to share a small and short demo of the new postprocessing pipeline of Nerve. I've been working on this new thingy this weekend (and a few evenings last week) and it seems to work quite okay.

A postprocess effect "chain" is a series of postprocess effects that are applied on the whole screen in sequence. Each effect is actually just a shader created with Materialist applied to the whole screen. Things as screen distortion effects, tone mapping effects, bloom effects, etc... are all possible this way. Anyway, I've made a testscene with two (crappy) post process effects in it, just to show some extreme things that are possible: (Ohw, and I know that it doesn't look nice at all, it's programmer art ;))

6th best 64k of 2007?

2008-01-01T19:49:00.000+01:00

I just noticed that 4sceners.de (a german demoscene site) placed Antiphore at place 6 in their top 10 of best 64k PC demos released in 2007. Here's a short paragraph from their article:

Während die Demo-Front schwere Geschütze auffuhr, und die 4k Intros die großen Gewinner 2007 sind, herrschte bei den 64k Intros Tristesse und dürfte als die Enttäuschung des letzten Jahres in die Geschichtsbücher eingehen. Erschreckend wenig 64k-Releases haben wir gesehen.

And:

Überraschend hoch platzieren konnten sich Antiphore von Inque und The War is over von der russischen Gruppe Quite. Zur Elite fehlt beiden Werken zwar noch ein Stück, dennoch sind sie stimmig designt.

The full article can be found here.

My german isn't that good, but from what I understand from the article is that 2007 wasn't such a great year for the 64k PC demo scene. And the fact that Antiphore gets ranked so high up in the list is even a little surprise for them.

Anyway, happy new year everyone! :)

Still alive!

2007-11-26T22:46:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to pass by and give a short status update, since it seems that not much has been happening since my last "expect an increased amount of progress in the coming months"-statement ;) Well, ehm, I actually am working on some stuff, but for some reason I was too lazy to post it on this blog. Anyway, I'am currently working on two subsystems for nerve.

The first one is called "Pfuu!1!1", which is still a working title, and it's a software synthesizer system. It consists of a core synth engine and a VSTi wrapper with a nice GUI which Izard can use to create tracks with. My aim is to give it a truckload of cool features so Izard can create some non-standard tracks with it. No more typical-v2-soundtracks, as we had for our previous 64k intros. Here are some screenshots of my current build: (look to the left)

These screenies show a bit of the current functionality, although this is probably completely going to change in the coming weeks ;) Next to that, I'm going to redo the GUI with fancy graphics, just like most commercial VSTi's. Until then, Izard has to do with the standard Windows look. The first screenshot shows the synth editor, the second screenshot shows the dynamic effects editor.

The second thingy I'm currently working on is called "Materialist", which is a visual material/shader development tool. It's a tool which you can use to create shaders with, by simply placing nodes and linking them together. It's functionality is inspired by UnrealEngine3's Material Editor, but focusses a bit more on size constraints and usability. The two screenies show my current build.

The first screenie shows the "workspace" in which you can create a shading graph, together with a realtime preview of the created shader rendered onto a 3d mesh. You can rotate the preview's camera and light directions. The shader graph generates a HLSL shader, which is visible in a separate tab page, which is shown in the second screenie. I use scintilla for this, which gives nice syntax highlighting and line numbering ;) Anyway, when you modify the shader graph (or any of the property values of one of its nodes) the shader HLSL is automagically regenerated, compiled and applied to the preview mesh. Any compile errors are shown in a log window.

Anyway, as soon as I have some new stuff I'll post it here. I think a nice audio file with some noise from Pfuu!1!1 or an executable of Materialist would be useful. But they're both not that fully functional, yet.

Ohw and did I already say wxWidgets + wxFormBuilder is a really great combo?

Hooray!

2007-09-28T19:51:00.000+02:00

Wow, at last I have finished all my school duties. Today I have given the final presentation of my graduation project (titled Glaze: A flexible UI engine for video games). That was the last thing to do, and the only thing resting now is to receive my "Master of Science" degree somewhere in december. At last! Finally.

So as of today I can fully focus on my (kind of more than) daily work and (kind of more than) hobby work :) Expect an increased amount of progress in the coming months. We're (izard and I) already planning some new cool stuff for our next 64k demo :)

Video of Antiphore

2007-08-18T14:19:00.000+02:00

I took some time to capture a video of Antiphore:

And I also recorded the soundtrack:

Antiphore

2007-08-13T23:01:00.001+02:00

Wow, as promised we (Izard and I) went to Evoke 2 days ago, and as also promised we made an entry for the 64k competition. And we actually won that competition :) Woei! We didn't quite expect that, since we had to do quite some work (and haxxoring) at the partyplace. The submission deadline for our compo was at 19:00, and we arrived around 12:00. But we delivered our final compo entry at around 21:30, a bit too late, but just in time for the start of the competition which started at 22:00.

Anyway, it was our first visit to an international party. And it was quite fun. Lots of people and lots of competitions. Here are some screenies from our entry, called "Antiphore":

More info, comments, and a download link can be found at our entry's page at pouet.net.

Anyway, we did learn something this time I believe. Style is quite important ;) We focused more on style than on technology this time. And apparently that paid off. So that's something we're going to take to our next production.

Only some days left...

2007-08-08T22:55:00.000+02:00

There are only 2 days left before Evoke starts (it actually already starts friday, but we're going there on saturday) and we still have lots of stuff to do. The past week I did some work on some new stuff/tech we needed for our 64k, things like animated cables, unlit geometry and overlay support, but for now everything is done (well, ehm "good enough" is a better description) on the tech side. Izard is almost finished with the soundtrack, and he's already working on a (huge) scene. And since the tech stuff is kind of finished enough, I think I'm going to help out with some texture work and overlays. And possibly some scenes too.

Anyway, 1 week for a complete demo is a bit short :) But we're definitely releasing something at Evoke, no matter how unfinished and crappy it will be :-)

PS. I transitioned to using Trac for my issue management. I was using Mantis before, but Trac just feels a lot better and is more complete (with an integrated wiki and source browser).

Wow...

2007-07-31T21:57:00.001+02:00

Some months ago I stumpled upon another nice demoengine. I was already known with aDDiCT2 (from Conspiracy) and .werkzeug (from Farbrausch). But this new demoengine, called picoEngine, was something different from those. For one, it was meant for full-size demos only, but more important, it was completely integrated into Maya. I always thought having my engine inside Maya would be good idea; apparently some other guys out there had exactly the same idea :-)

Anyway, I just rediscovered a website with info on their engine. It contains some cool images. The group is called "plastic". And they created a few really nice demos with it.

Next stop: Evoke 2007

2007-07-28T20:04:00.000+02:00

Izard and I are kind of planning on going to Evoke this year. That's a demoparty in Köln
(Germany), which isn't actually that far from home at all. (Only a few hours by car or train). Since this is our first foreign party visit, we want to release something nice there to impress people... so we're going to work on a new 64k demo again. We've read the comments on our last entry at Pouet.net. Especially these:

"For colours, next time pic a picture of your favourite graphics artist (or desktop background). Something that you can look at and think.. Yeah I can sense that it looks good... Then sample the colours in that image to copy the "it looks good" into your intro. Its usually not that simple, but that should get you started :)"

"i enjoyed the tunnel part"

Anyway. I haven't actually worked on Nerve at all after the release of Dahlia, and for Evoke I'll probably only have time during 2 weekends and 5 evenings :-) Anyway, we're going to create something again. Hopefully nicer than Dahlia.

Video of Dahlia (party version)

2007-06-07T22:22:00.000+02:00

Officially I'm still working on a final version of Dahlia. But, since it will probably take some time before I have enough motivation to actually work on it, I've created a video of the party version of Dahlia. This is the version we submitted to the democompo, the one that was released first. An updated, final, version will be released somewhere in the near future. Probably together with a new video :)

Ohw, and I just noticed that the comments system for this blog was kind of broken :( My template was still using an old no longer supported way of posting comments. I've patched it and posting comments seems to work fine again :)

Soundtracks

2007-06-01T22:35:00.000+02:00

I took some time to extract the soundtracks of all four demos we made until now with Inque. Here they are (in 192kbit mp3), in chronological order:

Helix (2001)

Obsoleet (2006)

Soil (2006)

Dahlia (2007)

Helix' soundtrack was made by Izard and Organix using our own selfmade software synth engine. The soundtracks for Obsoleet, Soil and Dahlia were done by Izard using the v2 software synth engine (but for Obsoleet's track he had a little bit of help from Cosmiq and Cyrex).

Vista doesn't like v2

2007-05-30T22:08:00.000+02:00

Some time ago (two or three weeks perhaps, not so sure) I detected a nice problem in the v2 software synth library I've been using for our 64k demo's. It's already a bit old news, but I just recently noticed that I'm not the only unlucky person experiencing this bug with v2. So maybe I can help some people by sharing my info here.

What I noticed was that all apps that used libv2 (v1.0) crash on my Vista pc. Exactly the same .exe files ran fine on Windows 2000 and XP. Even the demoapp that's shipped with libv2 crashed on my Vista pc, but worked fine on 2000 and XP. I used VS2005 both with and without SP1, but that didn't give different results.

Since I really wanted to use v2 on Vista, I started debugging/h4xx0ring libv2 using IDA. What I found was that libv2 uses incorrect settings for its internal wave format, which for some odd reason doesn't give a problem on Windows 2000/XP, but DOES give errors on Vista. In the latter case it results in an access violation when calling ssInit().

I've been able to fix this error in libv2.lib by modifying the following two bytes:

offset: 0xAC88, was: 0x80, changed it to 0x10
offset: 0xAC89, was: 0xAF, changed it to 0xB1

For me, that fixes the problem :)

I've contacted kb about this issue (in the first week of May), and he'll probably release a new patched version of libv2. But until then, manually patching libv2.lib is the only way of fixing this bug.

Dahlia

2007-05-16T22:46:00.000+02:00

Hi, I'm back again from Outline 2007. We (Izard and I) once again managed to finish a small 64k demo for the competition there. And (once again) we've ended up with the second prize: a t-shirt :)

The demo is called Dahlia and is 52kb in size. It is completely built with Nerve and the v2 soundsystem (from Farbrausch). Here are some screenshots (from the party version):

You can find Dahlia on Pouet.net here. You'll find a download link there too.

Most of the demo is made in a hurry in the week before the party and live at the partyplace. We had everything finished 15 minutes before the actual deadline. But we had to remove some stuff in the last minutes before the deadline to get everything working, so we're currently working on a "fixed", "final", version of Dahlia. Which will be released asap, together with a video. Hopefully :)

Anyway, I think Dahlia is already a bit better than Soil (our second 64k using Nerve) and a lot better than Obsoleet (our first 64k using Nerve). And we're already planning on a new 64k to be released somewhere this summer, which should be an improvement on Dahlia in terms of style/design and unique effects.

Ohw and I just had to chose the title Dahlia after seeing this movie :)

Outline 2007 here we come

2007-05-11T10:33:00.000+02:00

Okay, we're going to Outline 2007 tomorrow and we still have lots of stuff to do (as usual :)). But at least our technology is quite mature now. And Izard is almost ready with the soundtrack. We've already been working on some scenes for our entry, but we probably have to do some work at the partyplace too :)

Cables, and the road to Outline 2007

2007-04-30T21:36:00.000+02:00

Last week I discovered that the next upcoming demo party, Outline 2007, is already helt on May 11. I assumed it was helt begin july, so I would still have enough time to implement all kinds of cool stuff... but apparently that's not the case :|

Izard and I already decided that we're going to Outline and that we're going to create a new 64k to release there. But we only have less than 2 weeks left, so we'll have to do with a bit less cool stuff...

Anyway I already gave a running build of all the tools to Izard, so he can start working on some art. Last week I've improved the renderer a bit (using a Pre-Z pass, and shorter pixel shaders) and this weekend I've implemented support for lofted NURBS curves. Izard wanted a way to create organic cables. We can now create those by simply drawing NURBS curves in Maya. It took quite some effort to implement this, but it works great already.

Hopefully Izard can create some good looking stuff with it, I've only been able to create knots and crappy splines with them :)

Anyway, next two weeks will be used for fixing irritating bugs, adding more cool post effects, and probably optimize everything a bit.

Flowerpower

2007-04-09T21:23:00.000+02:00

Procedural shapes are now fully supported by nerve. I've implemented support for them in the viewport renderer, which was the last thing to do in order to actually use them. As an experiment I made this nice flower out of procedural shapes (8 of them).

Anyway, have a nice Easter! :)

Proceduralness galore

2007-04-01T21:17:00.000+02:00

Last week I worked a bit on a new type of mesh for nerve. Next to the way too basic primitive mesh (which could only generate spheres, cubes, planes and cylinders), I implemented a procedural mesh. This mesh has a parameter named "formula" in which is simply a piece of text holding formulas (or formulae?) for the x,y,z,u and v components of the mesh. Generating this mesh is just a matter of evaluating this formula for different values for s and t, my loop values.

Anyway, I wrote a special formula language for this purpose: Funk. Here's a piece of Funk code for the image to the right:

// my crappy sphere for testing, uses s, t and pi

var radius = (1 + 0.2 * cos(<s>*20*<pi>) * sin(<t>*20*<pi>));

var x = radius * sin(<s>*<pi>*2) * sin(<t>*<pi>);
var y = radius * cos(<s>*<pi>*2) * sin(<t>*<pi>);
var z = radius * cos(<t>*<pi>);

var u = <s> * 8;
var v = <t> * 8;

This piece of code is compiled into Funk VM bytecode. This pile of bytecode gets executed by my Funk VM which is running in my demo system and in Maya.

You can already edit and change this formula and see the results in realtime in Maya, but I'm currently working on a separate Code Editor dialog to make everything a bit more easy.

Although everything works quite okay already, I still have to clean everything up a bit more. And I still have to implement support for this into my viewport renderer and stand alone demo viewer. But I'm already quite pleased with the results.

PS, I used the GOLD Parsing System to create my own language. Kudos to Walter for the tip :)

Vector graphics

2007-03-18T00:21:00.000+01:00

After getting some inspiration from ProFX, a commercial procedural texture engine, I made my own vector rasterizer node for Gentex this weekend. It currently only supports SVG files, and only a vary limited subset of SVG's features. Only colored lines of variable width to be precise :) But it's already quite useful. Rasterizing is btw completely performed by GDI. Support for filled shapes, curves, gradients etc might be added later on.

Normalmaps

2007-03-11T16:42:00.000+01:00

Normalmaps are finally working correctly now. I already had support for them but they were completely buggy. Since I can now render directly to Maya's viewport, it was much easier to find the bugs in my shaders and mapping code.

Anyway, this already makes it possible to create much cooler visuals. Although I perhaps have to implement some other lighting models than my current phong implementation. Everything looks so plastic this way ;)

Oh yes!

2007-03-08T22:41:00.000+01:00

Yes, my viewport renderer is working. At last. It can currently render the active scene into any viewport (and even multiple at the same time). It uses the selected camera, so you can swap between any of your cameras. And you can interactively modify the camera orientation by panning, rotating, etc..., just like any other normal viewport.

I've currently implemented "forced cooking". You have to run a mel script to update the scene data that's rendered in the viewports. Maybe I'll implement an intelligent update mechanism, so you won't have to force an update.

Anyway, I still need to do a lot of cleaning up in the code. But it's already working great. When everything is a bit more stable/final I'll have to make cool video out of this.

Viewport rendering and wxWidgets adventures

2007-03-04T22:25:00.000+01:00

This weekend I've been working on a viewport renderer that integrates into Maya 8.0. I want to use exactly the same rendering code as the standalone viewer app uses. But since my viewer isn't quite the most stable app around (demo's don't have to be stable :)), I didn't want to execute my rendering code in Maya's process. (Since a crash or a memory leak in my own rendering code would probably completely crash Maya). So for that reason I've implemented my viewport renderer as a client/server setup, where I have a renderer-server running in the background and Maya serving as a client requesting for the rendering of frames. Communication is done through named pipes. The renderer server renders its frames into a piece of shared memory which Maya displays into its viewport. I haven't actually implemented the rendering yet btw. The current renderer only clears the screen to green :) (but it already uses DirectX to do this)

Ohw and I've been looking into wxWidgets and wxFormBuilder. I'm getting tired of designing windows and dialogs using crappy Win32 resources. And wxWidgets really looks promising. I've spent almost my whole sunday afternoon building, testing, crashing, linking and rebuilding wxWidgets and my nerve plugins before I found the magic combination of library build flags that didn't crash Maya or wxWidgets... (grmbl) Anyway, I finally have wxWidgets integrated into my maya plugin. And my first wxWidgets powered dialog is already up and running :) (although it doesn't do much yet)

On to the next step: build the actual renderer.

Still alive

2007-02-27T22:18:00.000+01:00

Just wanted to say that after quite a long period of doing lots of stuff that didn't have anything to do with nerve I'm back on working on the system again. One of the reasons for this is that last week Izard told me that there'll be another Outline party again. Last year's Outline party was really fun, so I'm thinking of going again this year... But not without a nice demo ofcourse :)

Another thing that gave some ideas/inspiration is that I recently read somewhere that Maya 8.0, which is already a few months old, has support for custom viewport renderers through plugins. And that an example Direct3D viewport renderer is even supplied as part of the samples in the SDK. Wwoooo! :)

I've already ported my Nerve tools from Maya 7.0 to Maya 8.0 (only took about 15 minutes ;)), and I'm now working on my own "Nerve viewport renderer". That way you'll get a direct "live" view of the scene, which "kinda" looks like how it's shown in the demo. Including full hlsl shaders and posteffects. This will hopefully help a lot creating nice visuals.

That's the plan. As soon as I have everything up and running, I'll post some screenshots.

Videos

2006-11-06T13:00:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I took some time to capture some videos of the three demos I made with Inque. They're hosted at Youtube btw. Ohw and the quality still sucks. I'm going to upload better versions, with a higher bitrate.

Soil (july 2006)

Obsoleet (June 2006)

Helix (2001)

Multiple lights

2006-11-01T23:15:00.000+01:00

After some reading and haxx0ring I finally have my multiple-light support up and running. Hooray :) My initial plan was to have my shaders support of to 4 lights per pass. But I already reached my shader size limit when using only 2 lights per pass. So for now, I'm doing multiple rendering passes per lit object. It's one pass for each light affecting an object. I haven't done any performance testing yet. But for what I've understood this isn't very performance friendly, but as long as I keep the number of lights affecting an object low, nothing bad will happen :)

Anyway, as you can see in my screenie it actually works. The scene in that picture contains 5 lights, all affecting each of the 5 objects.
Ohw and the other half of the picture is a screenshot from the scene as I modelled it in Maya. Isn't that good looking programmer art? :)

Lighting, camera, action!

2006-10-23T13:41:00.000+02:00

This weekend I started working on the lighting part of nerve. You can now place pointlights in Maya, animate them, or parent them to other objects, and they get automagically used by the viewer. Detecting which lights influence which objects I test their bounding boxes hierarchically against the bounding boxes of the scene geometry. Afaik it's not too bad performance wise. And, well, it works great :)

The next step is to improve my material shaders, to support multiple lights, since it only supports 1 light per material at moment. This will be increased to a max of 4 lights at a time per object. Ohw and I'm thinking about using lightmaps for non-moving/static objects.

A little update

2006-10-17T23:17:00.000+02:00

After such a long time I think it's time for a small update. The last weeks I managed to work a tiny little bit on Nerve. I've implemented very basic frustum culling, using bounding boxes. I'm going to improve it a bit by using hierarchical culling and some extra checking using bounding spheres. But I'm already a bit proud of it. It's my first frustum culler ever :) (I always only did near-plane culling in the past ;)) Btw, lots of kudos to this Frustum Culling article on flipcode.

Well, I'm going to pimp the viewer a bit more now. It will need better/correct materials, lighting, perhaps shadowing and off course post-effects.

Ohw and this doesn't mean I dropped the XNA ideas. Well hmm, maybe a little bit... For now :)

Wurk, wurk

2006-08-31T23:20:00.000+02:00

A whole month has passed since my last update. The past few weeks I haven't been working much on Nerve due to work (we're on a tight schedule at work), my thesis project and a healthy lack of motivation. I think the main problem is that I'm coding a lot at work, and I like it :), which kind of takes away the fun from my spare time coding sessions.

I've just recently started looking into the XNA framework (beta) from Microsoft. It's a .NET framework (together with a free development environment using C#) aimed at creating games for both PC and Xbox 360. Together with some friends I've been thinking of creating a small game using XNA. Which will be quite cool, since this way I can also learn C# while having fun creating a cool game :)

Anyway, that's the plan. For now I'm still stuck in XNA. Apparently Microsoft didn't have any time to include a mesh loader in their (beta) framework... So I'll have to make something myself :(

Demozone 2006

2006-07-31T21:42:00.000+02:00

Together with Izard I went to Demozone 2006 this weekend. Last week I've spent lots of evenings working on nerve (making it all work), so we could release a 64k demo at the competition at demozone. Well after Outline 2006 we actually managed again to release something at a party. But to be short, we're still not very proud of the result... all the content (scenes, graphics, animations) were made in a few hours at the party. And I didnt have much time to fix all the bugs still in there... but well, I'm still proud that we actually made something again :)

It's a 37kb demo. We named it "Soil". It lasts for 3 minutes. Here are some pictures:

We ended up at third place in the compo. Out of three contestants :) But, although ending at last place, we still won a large cheap cup and a frisbee for ending up at third place.

You can download Soil here: Inque-Soil.zip (37kb).

Getting Nervous...

2006-07-23T22:33:00.000+02:00

This weekend I've finished work on Gentex (for now). I've fixed the most irritating bugs and added two new nodes: a text node (which I just copy-pasted from my old "Textureer" texture generator) and a normal map generator (since I really want to have normal maps in the demo for demozone).

I've also rewritten my exporter plugin for Maya. My previous version was using XML, but having an XML parser in your 64k demo isn't that smart :) So, as of now, I'm using a custom packed fileformat.

The next thing I'm going to work on, is getting my Viewer (the actual demo) working. It will have to be able to load the exported scenes. I had already hacked together a viewer project back at Outline, so I'm going to reuse that one, with some adjustments.

Only 5 days to go...

P.S. I've added my current build of Gentex to the downloads page.

Much work, little time

2006-07-16T21:48:00.000+02:00

I just noticed that not much time rests between now and the start of Demozone. To be exact, there are only 2 weeks left. There are quite a lot of things I still want to have finished before the party, things like the whole shader system, support for lighting and shadowing, support for smooth TCB splines in Maya, and a commandline viewer application. That's a bit much work for just 2 weeks I think... Well who cares :)

Ohw wait, I almost forgot that I wanted to say that I'm currently working on support for multiple maps in Gentex. Maps such as a diffuse map, a specular map, a normal map. Those things. You can create those, all in one network. That's the plan.

Ah, and my friend Izard is already working on a soundtrack for the demo. He's using V2 from farbrausch again. We're going to stick to it for one more time ;) (Although Izard is not too happy about it, V2 seems to have some sucky thingies in it :))

Ohw and in the meantime I've been to the symposium in Santiago in Spain (which was kind of nice) and I bought a new laptop (to be able to code outside during the very hot summer days, and also to not having to carry an oversized pc to parties :)).

Materials in Maya

2006-06-25T22:08:00.000+02:00

This weekend I got the Gentex materials working in Maya. Still with a lot of side issues, but hey.. it works :) You can create a special Gentex shader, just like you would create a Lambert shader. This Gentex shader can be used in Maya just like any other shader. When you select it, a large "Edit in Gentex..." button will appear, which will launch Gentex and load the selected material in it. You can then modify the material, and save it. Then when you close Gentex again, the selected material will regenerate its bitmaps to reflect the changes. This works great ;)

And everything gets stored in the .mb file. No external files are used.

But it's still a bit buggy. I still need to pay a bit more attention to illegal cases. Like when there's an error while regenerating a bitmap. At the moment my plugin crashes hard, taking down Maya with him :)

Ohw, and my short paper for SIACG2006 got accepted. So next week I'm off to Santiago de Compostela in sunny Spain. But I still have to prepare lots of things, so the development of Nerve has to wait a week (or two...).

Displacement

2006-06-18T21:57:00.000+02:00

Although the weather wasn't cooperating this weekend (it was, again, quite hot here :(), I've been able to do some work on Gentex. I've added a new node, a Displacement node. You can see an example texture using only subplasmas, displacement nodes and mixers here on the right. This new node is quite useful for creating organic-looking textures.

I think I won't do any more work on Gentex for a short while now, since I'm going to focus a bit more on the rest of Nerve. Things as the export plugin and the custom gentex shader for Maya still need a lot of work. They're hardly usable atm. The first point of attention is getting these Gentex generated-textures visible and usable in Maya.

Ohw, and I've also added a new release of GentexEditor to the downloads page. Together with a new example material (the one from the image above).

Demozone here I come :)

2006-06-13T21:24:00.000+02:00

There's another demoparty on its way. It's called DemoZone and will be held around July 30 somewhere in Flevoland (it's part of CampZone which is a huge LAN party where everyone brings his own camping gear and tries to survive for a week).

I'm going to work on a 64k demo for DemoZone. And since there are still 7 weeks to go I should be able to finish something better than Obsoleet :) (well as long as my work, my thesisproject and the weather don't interfere too much)

Ohw and I started work on a custom tiny c lib. With the help of WCRT, LIBCTINY and this site. Using the tiny c lib, I've managed to create a Gentex image generator in an executable of 7kb (of which 4.5kb was taken by Gentex). This is already a lot smaller than the ~60kb I got using the default lib (LIBCMT.LIB).

Lessons from Outline 2006

2006-06-05T19:57:00.000+02:00

Okay I'm back from Outline 2006. I've actually managed to create a small 64k demo at the party place. I started on saturday morning at around 9:30 and worked through the night till sundag afternoon at around 18:00, which was de deadline. I started with only a kind of working Gentex and an exporter and geometry plugins for Maya, but they all used XML. So I had to build my own renderer and mini demo engine. And I also made a crappy animation evaluater. The final result is way less than what I hoped it would become, but I think it's okay for one and a half day of coding.

During the coding I experienced lots of problems, of which some were just plain bugs crashing your whole demo (never forget to init your classmembers in teh constructor! it can same you a whole hour of debugging :)), and some where fundamental design problems (using XML in your 64k demo is not size-efficient ;)). The things I learned this weekend can be summed up to this:

Don't rely on XML completely. The demo should use it's own custom packed format. I first build in XML support (using TinyXML) but then I didn't have much time left to implement a completely packed data format. So I made my own XML to kindof-binary-XML convertor. So I just had to write my own XML reader with exactly the same API as TinyXML, but which uses the binary XML files. Well it worked fine. But it's still not very size efficient. In the future I should my own binary packed format. And let the demo use that one from the start.
Create your own crt lib, with only the needed essentials. I used Visual Studio 2005 at the start, saturday morning it was. But it created way too large exe files. In the past I used Visual Studio 2002, which is capable of creating way smaller files. After some analysis it turned out that the problem could be solved by creating my own CRT lib, and use the "Ignore default libraries" option, ignoring the default LIBCMT.lib. This was not something I wanted to spent too much time on, since I haven't done this before, so I simply decided to port back to Visual Studio 2002. But for any upcoming projects I really need to spend some time on setting up my own tiny CRT lib.
Linear interpolations suck :) I was too lazy to implement smooth TCB animation curve support. But the linear interpolation I used in the animation curves for the demo were really sucky...
Don't create an engine and tools at teh party place :) Next time I only want to focus on visual design at the party place ;)
Sound makes up 50% of a demo. Not in size, but in resulting quality.
UPX is absolutely not the best packer around. I used UPX on our demo. If I had only done some googling I would have known that there are better free packers around. I could have squeezed out another 8kb of packed data. That would be around 30/40kb of unpacked data! That's a lot :(
I need more nodes in Gentex. People don't like checkerboards and simple plasmas.

Thanks go out to Izard, Cosmic and Cyrex for creating a cool soundtrack using a tool they'd never seen or touched before. And thanx go to some guy named Dylan for giving me the lib of farbrausch's soundengine, named V2. Integrating v2 in the demo only took 15 mins. And it works great. But on my next project I think I'll create my own tiny engine, using Buzz machines, rather then falling back to v2.

Ohw and we were ranked second (out of three contestants ;)), which got us 25,- euros and a free t-shirt! Hooray! :)

You can download Obsoleet here: Inque-Obsoleet.zip

Outline 2006

2006-06-02T23:43:00.000+02:00

Together with my friend Izard from Inque I'm going on an adventure to Outline 2006 tomorrow. That's a small demo party near the city of Arnhem. Which is kind of nearby (compared to the places where most of the other larger demo parties are helt). Until two days ago I didn't have any plans for going, but then I heard Izard went, so well I just had to go too :) It's been a long time since I've been to a demo party (my last one was TakeOver 2001, where we, Inque, release our 64k demo Helix), so I am kind of excited going to Outline.

Ohw and I'm going to try to make a 64k demo while I'm there. I still don't know what the deadline is, but hopefully I have more than like 10 hours to work on de 64k. The only thing I have working right now is Gentex. So I'll need.. ehm.. a gfx renderer, some export stuff for Maya, an animation system and a sound engine. Well... maybe I'll need more than 10 hours :)

Anyway, this will be a nice experiment to see how Gentex will behave in a demo system.

Improvements

2006-05-31T21:57:00.000+02:00

While searching teh web for new texture synthesis ideas I discovered a cool texture generator called NeL Texture Editor. It's created by a guy named Hulud from a demo group called Digital Murder.

Right until now my main inspiration for Gentex was the famous Aardbei Texture Generator (ATG), and the accompanying Hugi #18 article by Ile. Gentex' nodes are based on the effects that were present in Ile's texture generator. But Gentex' connected-nodes-network view is completely different than ATG's static-4-layer view. That's were I wanted Gentex to differ from the oldschool systems. (I think ATG's GUI, with only 4 preview views and the use of an effect stack kind of sucks and limits the functionality of the tool...)

But this new texture generator tool, NeL Texture Editor, looks a lot like the tool I want Gentex to become. (Although it does lack a good looking GUI :)). Next to having lots of available nodes, it also uses a graphical network structure. Just like Gentex does :) So I've been analysing NeL's features to see what I could use in Gentex, and I've come up with the following cool stuff:

Each node should have an extra input port, and two extra properties: "Blend mode" and "opacity". This way you can chain nodes together, blending one on top of another one. Without the need for a seperate Mixer node. This simplies the network.
The Mixer node I currently have, should be converted into a Masked Mixer. Should take a mask as an input.
I'll need some new nodes:

AlphaSetter, 2 inputs. It will combine the RGB of input 1 and the alpha of input 2.
Cells, 0 inputs. It will need a mode setting, to choose between "cells", "diamonds" and "blobs" mode. Especially the diamonds mode looked very cool in NeL, so I should implement that too :)
A vector art node, 0 inputs. To generate coloured line drawings. Very useful basic building block.
A sinus pattern, 0 inputs. Together with the already planned displacement you can create cool wobble effects. And it's usefull for other purposes too I guess.
Gradient image. Map the color(s) of one image into some other range.

These are all just ideas. But I'm planning on implementing them soon. Hopefully I have some spare time next weekend :)

No more invalid cables

2006-05-29T22:27:00.000+02:00

I've implemented a 'valid-cable' check which forbids the creation of cables that are plain evil. Such as cables that start and stop on the same node, or cables from an output to an output, or from a source to a source, etc... While drawing wires the colour of the wire can change to grey, indicating that this cable is invalid.

Of course, you can still create all kinds of invalid feedback networks using more than 1 node... but that's a bit harder to check :) (so I won't ;))

Also implemented an option to double or half the size of a single node. This only works on a single node (you cannot select more than 1 node at a time). And it also breaks all invalid connections to and from the node. Not all nodes like to get connected to a node with a different size... which instantly invalidate the cables to the newly resized node.

I'm planning to create a "resize nodes" dialog, in which you can a selection of nodes together. But I'm not so sure if that's really needed at all.

Color pick0r and import/export support

2006-05-28T22:37:00.000+02:00

This weekend I've been working on a colour picker dialog. It was needed for my subplasma node (so you can change the color of the plasma), and probably for many future nodes too. I've made my own color picker dialog, nearly identical to Photoshop's color picker :) (it's still not finished though, still have to add HSV support to it, and a color-copy-paste option).

I've also finally implemented import/export options. You can now actually save and load materials to and from XML files. (please don't edit them by hand, my input validation is very borked! :))

You can download my latest build here, together with a grass texture I made (the one from the screenshot above):

Some bugfixes and a sub plasma

2006-05-25T22:56:00.000+02:00

Had a day off today so I had some time to work a bit more on Gentex. I've fixed some stupid bugs and added some new features. One thing I added is the option to rename a node. Could be useful when you have huge networks with nodes all over the place ;) I'm thinking about adding special comment nodes too. So you can add annotations to your network, could be even more useful...

Ohw and I've added a subplasma node. You can see it here on the right. It puts random values on a grid and interpolates (using Catmull-Rom interpolation) in between. You can modify the grid size and the random seed. I also want to add a colour setting, but I first have to create a property editor for colours, something like a colour picker :)

My first texture

2006-05-21T20:59:00.000+02:00

This weekend I've been working a bit more on Gentex. It's finally capable of generating a texture :) (It's shown here on the right). It's not much, but it's okay for a start.

Most of the things I've added this weekend are GUI things to make life a bit easier. I've added a small help window with info on the controls, since they aren't quite standard (unless you're used to Maya's controls). Next to that you can now probe any node in your network. With probing I mean showing the internal result buffer of the node. This is useful for tweaking your texture. Well also added some other things, like a "reorient view" option and a context menu per node, but those are just GUI refinements.

I've also started a Todo list (which you can find here, and also on the menu bar on the right). This way I can write down my ideas somewhere and also keep track of my progress.

Last of all I wanted to add my current version of Gentex, as a standalone program, as a download:
GentexEditor-21052006-2107.exe (you'll need Windows 2000/XP to be able to run it)

Windows API sucks

2006-05-16T22:42:00.000+02:00

Hmm, I really should stop using the Windows API... I keep using it for most of my projects, Gentex included, but it really gets frustating now :( It took me a whole evening (~3 hours) to get my scrollbar working. Not that was very hard, but I also had some trouble with my nasty SetWindowLongPtr calls... well. blegh. Really have to take a look into MFC, or GTK or QT.

But anyway, got my first integer editor working now.

Operator editors

2006-05-14T22:25:00.000+02:00

Had some spare time (finally finished my shortpaper for SIACG2006 yesterday) so I've begun working on operator editors in Gentex. Each node has several parameters you can edit when you select it. The image to the right is my first test-editor. When you select a checkerboard node you get that editor :) The idea is to have a couple of general purpose controls which you can use to build up editors for all nodes. At the moment I only have an integer value editor control, which is just a scrollbar with a label in front of it :)

It's still not working completely, but as soon as this integer editor thingy works, I'll start working on a string editor, a boolean editor and maybe an enum editor. In the future I'll probably add some more advanced editors, like a colour editor (with a nice colourpicker on it), a multi-line text editor (with support for multiple fonts and colours) and maybe a vector drawing editor....

Rendering support

2006-05-07T17:21:00.000+02:00

Got the rendering code of Gentex working now. It will only update changed (dirty) nodes and all nodes depending on dirty nodes.

Also added resultwindows to Gentex. You can now see the resulting texture in a separate window, and it gets updated when you render your network. At the moment only the resulting image in the end-nodes (the "collector" nodes) can be shown in a resultwindow, but maybe it's useful to be able to attach such a resultwindow to any network node... that way you can kind of probe the intermediate results. But that would only be a nice extra for later.

The next step will be to implement the editing of node parameters. Atm you can not change any of the settings. I also have to implement the auto-render-upon-change feature.

Progress logwindow

2006-05-03T22:21:00.000+02:00

Today I've added a progresswindow (or log) to Gentex. I wanted to start on the rendering stuff, but I needed some log and a statusbar to display the rendering progress, so had to make those first ;)

Also got the resultview working yesterday. Altough nothing is shown there, since I still have to write the rendering code. That's my next point of attention, to get the rendering code working.

Assembly here I come :)

2006-04-29T22:41:00.000+02:00

I forgot to mention I've already done some work on the system. I have a basic exporter plugin, a simple primitive geometry generator, a custom shader/material and a material editor plugin working now. Next step is to have the material editor (Gentex) working.

Ohw, and hopefully I can have a very basic, but workable, version of Nerve finished before Assembly 2006, which starts on August 3, so I can create a 64k demo with Inque.

Work in progress

2006-04-29T22:03:00.000+02:00

Welcome to my dev blog on the Nerve demo system. Nerve is my attempt to create my own system for creating small (64k and even 4k) demos. Btw, for more info on "demos", go to scene.org.

Nerve will be a bit different than the two major publicly available demo systems: Werkzeug (from Farbrausch) and ADDiCT2 (from Conspiracy). These two systems try to be a total stand alone solution for creating demos, Nerve will (ab)use Maya for all modeling and Buzz for audio composing. In short Nerve will consist of:

Maya exporter plugin
Several maya plugins and scripts for creating/modifying geometry
A maya plugin for creating materials (this will be a remake of Gentex, my procedural texture generator).
A viewport renderer integrated in Maya, using the same renderer as the actual demo
A standalone viewer
Several sound generators (plugins) for Buzz.

That's the idea for now.

Todo list

2006-01-01T13:28:00.000+01:00

After some initial usage of Mantis I now usage Trac for all issue management of Nerve.

You can find my issue tracker at http://glow.inque.org/stuff/trac.

Downloads

2006-01-01T13:24:00.000+01:00

Releases

Binaries

Here are some demos I worked on and that are powered by Nerve:

Antiphore (august 2007 - 64k - 1st at Evoke 2007 - more info)
Dahlia (may 2007 - 64k - 2nd at Outline 2007 - more info)
Soil (july 2006 - 64k - 3rd at Demozone 2006 - more info)
Obsoleet (june 2006 - 64k - 2nd at Outline 2006 - more info)

All these release can also be found here on pouet.net.

Videos

I've also made videos of all releases we made. In case the binaries don't work :)

Helix (2001):

Obsoleet (2006):

Soil (2006):

Dahlia (2007):

Antiphore (2007):

Soundtracks

And in case you want to listen to one of the soundtracks of our releases, I've added those too for your convenience :)

Helix (2001)

Obsoleet (2006)

Soil (2006)

Dahlia (2007)

Antiphore (2007)

Tools

Binaries

These are my unstable, untested, development builds of parts the Nerve demo system tools.

Please note that Nerve itself isn't released at the moment. The binaries listed above are only a part of the full set of tools.

Materials

Here are some example materials. These probably aren't compatible with all versions of Gentex. Just try it with the latest version.