Some news

I'll be back soon as we have just moved to another country across the Atlantic. I found a friend who can help me to rebuild new assets and there may be an opportunity to work with another project that also works on Arx.

I'll let you know as soon as possible. I love you.

As was expected, here's a video showing the material system of "rebirth engine" built in Arx Fatalis. The material is very simple (just diffuse). The decor is managed as a static object with about 70 different materials. I applied on every texture a B-Spline pixel filtering" for each mipmap. In addition, I enabled the anisotropy for minification. The result is rather encouraging.

Here an example of the rebirth engine shader system:

#include "../public/declare_effect.h"

BEGIN_DECLARE_SHADER

BEGIN_SHADER( DX8_Flat, true )
    DECLARE_SHADER_PARAM( DIFFUSE, "TEXTURE", "0" )
    DECLARE_SHADER_PARAM( NORMAL, "TEXTURE", "1" )
END_SHADER( DX8_Flat )

STATIC_SHADER( DX8_Flat )
    SHADER.Commit_RenderState( RS_FILLMODE, FILL_SOLID );

    const std::string& sDiffuseValue = GET_SHADER_VALUE("DIFFUSE");

    ITexture_* pTexture = ASSET_MANAGER.Get_TextureByName( sDiffuseValue );
    if( pTexture )
    {
        SHADER.BindTexture( 0, *pTexture );
    }
    SHADER.Commit_TextureStageState( 0, TSS_COLOROP, TOP_SELECTARG1, 0 );
    SHADER.Commit_TextureStageState( 0, TSS_COLORARG1, TA_TEXTURE, 0 );
    SHADER.Commit_TextureStageState( 0, TSS_ALPHAOP, TOP_DISABLE, 0 );

DYNAMIC_SHADER( DX8_Flat )

END_DECLARE_SHADER


Here a new video:

Material and Texture integration part #1

Sorry for not writing sooner. I'm currently finishing a prototype with Unity (a 2.5d platformer) and I am preparing a big move. I have almost completed the integration of simple materials in Arx Fatalis (like wireframe and diffuse material). I took the opportunity to review the material system in the "rebirth engine": I added macros to quickly make new shader and I improved the transfer of materials parameters of the game to the shader system. Hopefully I can post a video or at least screen-shots very quickly.

The first integration of the "rebirth engine" is over. I decided to remove the portal system because the geometry batch was too small. The geometry of the world is now calculated by the graphics card. It only needs the textures:). It will be the next step.

The original video:

Rebirth engine integration part one

The integration of rebirth engine is almost finished. Briefly, the first iteration was to override all the function of Direct X to have a null renderer and reconnect one by one all the functions. For now the screen is black because I have to update the rebirth engine to include better management of dynamic vertex buffer. I have decided to do as the source engine like a begin mesh, a series of add vertex or push vertex and finally a end mesh. It's pretty simple and game code is relatively easy to understand and use. I'll send a few pieces of code to explain it all..

So let us begin.

The primary function of this blog is to update Arx Fatalis with technical improvements such as rendering, physics, etc.. I worked on this game and I'd like to share with you the progress of this project. I love this game and the technical issues associated with this port are very exciting. I hope you can soon play with this improved version.