I'm working on a free 3D engine for indie games, and I'm documenting the development in my blog. To make it a bit easier to find and read all the entries related to the 3D Engine, I've collected them all here, in the order they're supposed to be read.
I've been working on games for a while. Worked with a few commercial 3D engines, made a couple myself... I've been around the indie-scene for quite some time too. Most indie games that make money are 2D games (though some make use of 3D graphics cards to render their sprites faster), and that makes sense: the customer don't care, and it's a more cost-effective way to produce games... [ read more ]
So, as I mentioned the other day, I'll be making a 3D engine specifically suited to technically simpler 3D games, such as indie developers might want to make. I've started working on this now, and there's two major lessons I've learned over the years... [ read more ]
As you probably know by now, I'm making an indie 3D engine, and last time I talked about the abstraction layer for accessing the 3D hardware. This time, I'm going to talk a bit about the basic concepts of the higher level engine, touching on things like meshes, materials and the scene... [ read more ]
In some previous posts, I've talked about the indie 3D engine I'm making, and today, I'll be talking a bit about how I will handle materials and lighting. As with every part of this engine, I will keep it simple, and focus on techniques that have a big visual impact with little added complexity... [ read more ]
It's time for the next piece on the indie 3D engine I'm working on. You should read through the one about Basic Concepts if you haven't already, as this one builds on the concepts described in that one. This time, I will talk about instancing, which is the method we use to enable us to re-use the same models at multiple locations in the world, without needing duplicate copies of the model data... [ read more ]
We've covered quite a lot of ground when it comes to the indie 3D Engine I'm working on. We've decided on what sort of things it should be capable of, how we'll deal with material and lightings, and how we're managing the definition of a model and instances of one. But one thing we haven't touched on yet, is how we get the 3D models into the game in the first place... [ read more ]
When it comes to 3D games, you often find yourself in a position where you need to have a big area where the action takes place - the terrain on which to place your roads, buildings and other things. There's many ways to go about this (ranging from having the artists model everything by hand to having it all procedurally generated), and today I'll be talking about a very simple, straightforward way to generate terrain... [ read more ]
I guess by now, some of you are getting a bit impatient to see some actual code put together for this, and it is almost time to get down with the practical side of things, but before we do, there's ome more thing we need to look into: animation. So far, we've got models and lights which can be moved around, and in a way that's all we need for making simple animations through code. However, we have no means of animating characters within a 3D modelling package and have them played back in the engine. This is where morphs and skinning comes... [ read more ]
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