Blogs

AI-Generated Game Textures and Concept Art

Midjourney is an AI art generator you can interact with on Discord to make content for your game engine. To use it, first join the Discord channel and enter one of the "newbie" rooms. To generate a new image, just type "/imagine" followed by the keywords you want to use. The more descriptive you are, the better. After a few moments four different images will be shown. You can upsample or create new variations of any of the images the algorithm creates. And then the magic begins:

December 30, 2022

Tightening up the graphics and tripling down on glTF

As I have stated before, my goa for this game enginel is not to build a marketplace of 3D models, but instead to just make sure our model loading code reliably loads all 3D models that are compliant with the glTF specification. I started testing more 3D models from Sketchfab, and found that many of them are using specular/gloss materials. At first I thought I could just fudge the result, but I wasn't getting very good results, and the Windows 10 3D Object Viewer was showing them perfectly. This

December 30, 2022

Ultra Engine Client App

I've been working hard getting all the rendering features to work together in one unified system. Ultra Engine, more than any renderer I have worked on, takes a lot of different features and integrates them into one physically-based graphics system. A lot of this is due to the excellent PBR materials system that Khronos glTF provides, and then there are my own features that are worked into this, like combined screen-space and voxel ray traced reflections. Anyways, it's a lot of di

December 30, 2022

Exporting a glTF model from 3ds Max

Autodesk 3ds Max now supports export of glTF models, as well as a new glTF material type. The process of setting up and exporting glTF models is pretty straightforward, but there are a couple of little details I wanted to point out to help prevent you from getting stuck. For this article, I will be working with the moss rocks 1 model pack from Polyhaven. Getting geometry into 3ds Max is simple enough. I imported the model as an FBX file. To set up the material, I opened the compa

December 30, 2022

Ultra Engine Compatibility with Leadwerks Game Engine

As the first release of Ultra Engine approaches, it seems clear that the best way to maximize its usefulness is to make it as compatible as possible with the Leadwerks game engine. To that end, I have implemented the following features. Native Loading of Leadwerks File Formats Ultra Engine loads and saves DDS, glTF, and OBJ files. Other formats are supported by plugins, both first and potentially third-party, for PNG, JPG, BMP, TGA, TIFF, GIF, HDR, KTX2, and other files. Additionally,

December 30, 2022

Voxel Terrain

Voxel Terrain Part 1 - Voxelization

For the past few months I've been working on Voxel Terrain for Ultra. I started by creating an octree whose parent node encapsulates the bounds for the entire terrain and must be a perfect cube with dimensions that are a power of two. This ensures all child nodes can be neatly subdivided. If a more rectangular terrain is required the octree creates more than one parent node to make up the rectangle. The next step was to subdivide the parent node to a level where each node would represent

SpiderPig in Voxel Terrain

December 13, 2022

Code

Where Input Has A Name

I've spent the last few months pressing buttons, clicking joysticks and shaking my computer mouse to solve the solution input for Cyclone. Back when it shipped in June, I've created a system that allowed users to assign keys to actions, in which the game would detect as input. My player code never knew what button was pressed; it just knew what action was caused. This is very similar to how Steam Input works. There were a few flaws with my original system. Some of which didn't surface until

reepblue in Code

December 11, 2022

Cyclone Open For Mods

As a teenager, I've spent thousands of hours with the Source SDK. It was really cool how Valve gave people the real tools to develop and create maps and mods. Overtime I got to see and take apart games to see how they actually work. Overtime, the indie engine market took over, and making Source mods is now just a terrible experience. Hammer crashes more frequently and the SDK branch of the engine has old bugs that were never patched. I want the excitement I had of making maps and cool featu

August 28, 2022

Offroad car simulation

Buggy desert crawler

Considering this blog as a diary of progress about car simulation with Leadwerks, I had the dream to simulate those desert crawlers able to climb on sharperned hills with a lot of impuls, Swinging on the roads as they're light, allowing the player to discover rapidly a large part of the map. Technically all the features (directions, dampers, smoothing, acceleration) get simplified but adjusted to be in a good balance. The car may be overpowered but it's fun!

Marcousik in Offroad car simulation

August 14, 2022

General

Returning

For the last for years I've been lurking in the forums waiting patiently for the release of Ultra. I thought I'd be a good time to start up my blogs again about The Seventh World. The game that has been in the works for over a decade! I started this game in the Leadwerks 2 days. It started off as a very simple game but as I'm sure you're all aware, simple ideas can quickly grow into monsters of an undertaking if you let them! A few years ago, as I started fleshing out gameplay I

SpiderPig in General

August 13, 2022

postmortem

Structura postmortem

Structura Postmortem https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422980/Structura/ This game was done in my spare time, was about 4 years till the early access. Probably 6 months of full time work at best. I want to thank some of my work colleagues , who gave good hints/help about the game, in the coffee breaks (different times , no covid ) And the Leadwerks community for always being helpful. Early access release: 18 Dec, 2020 Full release: 6 May, 2021

aiaf in postmortem

July 20, 2022

Cyclone is now available in Early Access on Steam!

After sixteen months of week-by-week development, I'm happy to announce that the anticipated spiritual successor of the Portal mod, Blue Portals is now available for sale as an Early Access title on Steam! I want to take a moment to thank [b]everyone[/b] who has played the demo and gave feedback. There's still work to be done! Being an Early Access title allows Cyclone to continue keep players involved in the development process to help it evolve into the best it can be! I hope

June 23, 2022

Building a single-file 4K HDR skybox with BC6 compression

HDR skyboxes are important in PBR rendering because sky reflections get dampened by surface color. It's not really for the sky itself, but rather we don't want bright reflections to get clamped and washed out, so we need colors that go beyond the visible range of 0-1. Polyhaven has a large collection of free photo-based HDR environments, but they are all stored in EXR format as sphere maps. What we want are cubemaps stored in a single DDS file, preferably using texture compression. We'

June 22, 2022

Finalizing Terrain

I'm wrapping up the terrain features now for the initial release. Here's a summary of terrain in Ultra Engine. Terrains are an entity, just like anything else, and can be positioned, rotated, or scaled. Non-square terrains are supported, so you can create something with a 1024x512 or whatever resolution. (Power-of-two sizes are required.) Editing Terrain Ultra Engine includes an API that lets you modify terrain in real-time. I took something very complicated and distilled it down

June 17, 2022

Smart Tessellation

I've actually been doing a lot of work to finalize the terrain system, but I got into tessellation, and another rabbit hole opened up. I've been thinking about detailed models in VR. Tessellation is a nice way to easily increase model detail. It does two things: Curved surfaces get smoother (using point-normal triangles or quads) A displacement map can be used to make small geometric detail to a surface. These are really nice features because they don't require a lot of mem

June 7, 2022

The Cyclone Demo is now live!

From its initial concept in 2017 through the last sixteen months of development, I am ecstatic to announce that the free demo of Cyclone is now available in preparation for the June Steam Next Fest! This demo includes three maps from the main game showcasing the functionalities of Cyclone and various puzzle elements. The demo is available right on the Steam Store page! Cyclone on Steam (steampowered.com) While this is both an exciting and a scary time. I can't stress enough tha

June 1, 2022

Better Intellisense in Ultra Engine

Ultra Engine makes much better use of class encapsulation with strict public / private / protected members. This makes it so you can only access parts of the API you are meant to use, and prevents confusion about what is and isn't supported. I've also moved all internal engine commands into separate namespaces so you don't have to worry about what a RenderMesh or PhysicsNode does. These classes won't appear in the intellisense suggestions unless you were to add "using namespace UltraRender" to y

May 29, 2022

Cyclone Participating in Steam Next Fest 2022

I'm excited to announce that Cyclone will be participating in Steam Next Fest 2022! While I'll not be live streaming, a playable demo will be available during the festival. The demo will act like an even softer release than the Early Access release, which should roll into the planned release date of June 23rd, 2022! Add it to your wish list on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803590/Cyclone/ Check out the itch.io Page: https://reepblue.itch.io/cyclone Join my publ

May 23, 2022

Shadow Filtering

Happy Friday! I am taking a break from global illumination to take care of some various remaining odds and ends in Ultra Engine. Variance shadow maps are a type of shadowmap filter technique that use a statistical sample of the depth at each pixel to do some funky math stuff. GPU Gems 3 has a nice chapter on the technique. The end result is softer shadows that run faster. I was wondering where my variance shadow map code went, until I realized this is something I only prototyped in OpenGL a

May 20, 2022

Finalizing Shaders and Real-time Global Illumination Progress

I'm finalizing the shaders, and I was able to pack a lot of extra data into a single entity 4x4 matrix: Orthogonal 4x4 matrix RGBA color Per-entity texture mapping offset (U/V), scale (U/V), and rotation Bitwise entity flags for various settings Linear and rotational velocity (for motion blur) Skeleton ID All of that info can be fit into just 64 bytes. The shaders now use a lot of snazzy new function like this: void ExtractEntityInfo(in uint

May 9, 2022

Multiple Light Bounces

I have more than one light bounce working now, and it looks a lot nicer than single-bounce GI. The ambient light here is pure black. All light is coming off from the direct light, and bouncing off surfaces. It will take some time to get the details worked out, and more bounces will require more memory. I'm actually kind of shocked how good looking it is. This is just a single 128x128x128 volume texture at 0.25 meters per voxel. Light leaks seem to be not a problem, even at that low re