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Showing posts from June, 2013

Procedural fracturing: Mesh generation and physics

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This will probably be the last post on procedural fracturing. Why? Because it's mostly done!  In a few hours of heroic brain effort, I went from this: Lines are drawn between centroids and vertices in this image. There's also an axis pointing right is there for debug purposes To this: A fully procedural mesh! The little things After so much brain destruction over this, there were two bugs: one in finding the center of each circumcircle (I was dividing by zero somewhere, getting secret NaN s), and another in the centroid sorting algorithm. I also facepalmed really hard because the first sentence on the wiki page for polygon triangulation is "A convex polygon is trivial to triangulate in linear time , by adding diagonals from one vertex to all other vertices." Oops. I threw out the copy/paste ear clipping algorithm and just wrote my own thing to add diagonals. It's funny how something can seem so simple and obvious in retrospect. The only downside to

Procedural Geometry from Fracturing

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Here’s the follow up to the procedural fracturing post I wrote two weeks ago. As for the assets roadmap I talked about in the last post, I have decided that it doesn’t quite make sense to go over the assets at this point, when so much of that is still up in the air. I’m thinking of creating a dedicated roadmap/status page that gives the current progress on all stuff, for convenient access and updating. Anyways, here’s the juice: Why can’t I hold all these vertices? Last time we went over how to get the vertices out of a voronoi diagram, and I sort of-maybe-not-really fixed the problem I was having earlier with missing some of the vertices. I scrapped the whole compute shader business and switched it over to Unity C# code, and along the way I discovered LINQ  (which is like SQL for code?!?!) but that’s another story. Without using a compute shader, it became both easier and harder to debug. Easier because I could now draw gizmos (which are 3D wireframe objects that are only drawn in

Road Map: Programming

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Hi everyone, Here’s a first draft of the road map for Bad Things Happen in Space. This is my first attempt at collecting my thoughts into a roadmappy structure so it will be a little rough. Of course, everything is super subject to change and probably not going to resemble the final product. Part one includes an overview of programming tasks. Part two will have an overview of assets, and probably some other stuff. But first, LENS FLARES! *Chorus of angels* High Level Overview or what I need to do to launch the kickstarter: Mechanics programming (two/three months) Design tools and first ship (one week) Assets for alpha release (one month? maybe less) Produce video (no idea, two weeks maybe?) Kickstarter ! (four to five months out?) During that time, I will also need to find somewhere to live for August and also move to a storage container, and also also move out of a storage container into Boston some time in September, so these estimates are only relevant to Actual

Procedural fracturing for kinetic impacts

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So, here is the first post that actually has to do with the development of Bad Things. I've got a few ideas for posts - some are overview/roadmappy things, and some are more retrospective, instead, I thought I'd start with what I'm actually working on right now . Before we get started, if you haven't noticed, I've included some pages on the sidebar for About, Images, and Videos. wtf is procedural fracturing? The idea here is that when a kinetic weapon (something that is impact or kinetic energy based) collides with the hull of the ship, it should create an entry point that appears to have a broken hole in the center, and shards of bent and peeled metal around the impact site. There are several ways to go about this, you could just create some animated meshes that look like bent metal going through various states of broken-ness or repaired-ness. That's boring.  You'll see the same impact model over and over again and repairing it will always be the same

Bad Things Happen in Space

Hello everyone! As you may or may not know, I've recently put in notice to quit my job at Intel to work on my game full time. This is where I'll be cataloging the development process for my game: Bad Things Happen in Space . The goal here is to update this development blog at least once a week, but updates may come more frequently. I'll be talking about what I'm working on, what some challenges are, and what I plan to do. The posts will be fairly technical, so keep that in mind. In the near future, I'd like to set up some other pages on this site for media and demos and stuff, so stay tuned! (bad) Things are just getting started!