Update on next tutorial/example

Here's an update on what I have planned next.

I wanted to jump right into shadows next, but I realized that there's a few prerequisites before we get to that. One of those is rendering to a framebuffer/texture, and another is getting a depth map from another camera. So, next up is handling both of those. In addition, cube maps would be needed to handle shadows from point lights, so that's another topic to add.

However, my job is going to be picking up soon, and these require a lot of changes to the existing code that would take a lot of time to make as another tutorial in the series. Like before, I'm considering doing examples instead of tutorials here on out, so we can cover more topics in less time. The examples would still break down the new stuff, but they won't follow the process of adding it to the previous topic's project files.

Here the TV screen is showing the view from a second camera (the second camera is at the arrow)

Here it is rendering the depth information from the other camera

Update on Next Tutorial

I wanted to give everyone an update on the next tutorial, since it's been a while.

As you can see in the pictures, there's multiple lights at once, specular maps (look at the difference between the land and ocean), and spot lights. This code also includes directional lighting, but I think it didn't make the pictures.

I'm sorry to let this take so long. Life has been busy, but it should be less busy relatively soon.

The other problem has been trying to break this tutorial up into manageable chunks. I may have to switch to making it into an annotated example project instead of a tutorial (which might be better overall, and would let me make more content). Feel free to leave comments if you have any feelings about this (and I know some people have asked for that sort of change in the past).

Progress Update

It's been a while, and I want to fill everyone in on what/when the next tutorial will be. This weekend is the first time I haven't had a million other projects I should be doing, so I was able to make some real progress.

The next tutorial is going to be broken into two parts (for length's sake, but Part 1 will be useful on its own). 

The first part will handle loading more complex OBJ files, and loading materials from MTL files. The OBJ loader we already had only works on really, really simple OBJ files, and it won't cut it for loading most models with texture maps.

The second part will put this to better use by adding some simple lighting to the project.


Expect the whole thing before the end of the month. After the next tutorial, I plan on making a model viewer example to show what can be done.

Navigation changes

Quick update here, changed the blog navigation (at the top) to make things a little nicer. There's a list of all the tutorials so you won't have to search anymore (it'll end up being a bigger issue as time goes on), a downloads page for older tutorials (content being uploaded as fast as I can) and a list of expected future tutorials too. I'm still really busy with work right now, but the next tutorial will get hopefully not take too much longer to be finished.

My New Year's Resolutions

It's that time of year, so I'm going to set some goals for the near future. I've been really busy with work lately, but I'd like to post more content here:

Unnamed New Game - Gravity Test

This is just a little thing I was working on right now. Eventually this will be part of a real game. Eventually.

It's pretty obviously incomplete (there's no background, or loss condition, or menus, and it doesn't keep spawning things as you move away), but it's almost a start.
You can move the "player" (the one at the center of the screen) with either WASD or the arrow keys, add new bodies to the simulation with the numpad's plus key and reset it with the 'r' key.

Boxes in OpenTK

I'm just messing around in OpenTK for a while I wait for things to pick up. Random colored boxes was something that was a fad in WAYWO a while back, so I thought it'd be a decent post-hello world thing.

Then I took it further, loading textures into it:

Then I did one last thing, making a basic light that follows the mouse:

Dwarfpunch Mapper: 0.6 is out!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.6, so it's still not perfect, but working way better)

  It's a small update, but it brings about three important changes:

• The most obvious change is that the progress bar has been removed from the main window. Now it has a separate window that both makes it so the user interface doesn't "freeze up" anymore. It also gives users feedback about where the program is in the process, which will help with bug hunting in the future when crashes occur outside the developer environment.

• There's a new forest background layer. It now tiles a lot less obviously. It's really swollen up in size, but that should be fixed soon. We're going to replace it with a smaller tile, with some changes so it's repeating more, but also less obvious about it. Future versions will also let users change the textures without have to replace the files completely and control how the tiling works.

• Rainfall is now working a bit better. It's still not exactly perfect, but changing it made it not add weird bright spots that weren't attractive.

Dwarfpunch Mapper is now at 0.5.5!

Download available on Bitbucket (it's only 0.5.5, so it's not exactly perfect, just working)

   Dwarfpunch Mapper has been progressing nicely. Thanks to the documentation on his process kabookie was able to give me, I had a functional version up and running within a few days. However, it was actually quite lacking in the interface department. It was purely functional for a very basic version of the program. Now we're looking at this:

   Now users can toggle various layers on and off as we add more to the program. Some people on /r/dwarffortress were asking about glacier/tundra areas being visible as ice. 

   Since Dwarf Fortress has this "biome" output option, it's actually really easy to do something like this in a future version. Of course, it's going to be completely optional so you don't need to have ice and deserts if you don't want to.

  This version also started filling in the settings dialog, with some options for color added to the previously lonely image scale setting. This was originally meant to help testing, but it actually can make some kind of interesting fantasy landscapes possible:

   The top priorities now are getting the output more refined (matching the original Photoshop script more), replacing more of the hard-coded values with settings, and finding out what other layers can be added to the map, in that order.