Which GUI system are you using?
Any of the known GUIs (NiftyGUI, Lemur, tonegodgui) or your own?
There is only one place where I’m using Nifty. It’s an textbox, I was too lazy to make my own control for entering the text.
All other panels/windows are images placed on the GuiNode, drawn in AWT way, scaled from HD to fit the actual resolution. Every single image is implemented as GuiWindow with GuiControls placed on it. Few interfaces allows me to process simple events like MouseEnter, MouseExit, MouseMove, MouseClick, and some more complex ones like ButtonClick, DialogResult etc…
I can do everything much faster than using Nifty, which is just too huge and too complex for my needs.
Sounds like you rewrote parts of Lemur. No matter… just made me smile.
I don’t know Lemur so I do not know if I rewrote it or not. Anyway, the code is 100% mine so it meets 100% of my needs. And that was the idea: to have something both small and flexible. In my other thread there you can see how much time I wasted to force one Nifty’s control to work properly 
Oh, I feel your pain. I went through the same thing which is why I wrote Lemur. And I wrote it modularly to help other people write their own GUIs (even if they didn’t use the main Lemur GUI classes).
I’d be evangelizing harder if I had better docs… your solution is probably optimal for your needs. In any case, someday you might look at the source code for Lemur to see if it gives you ideas. My mouse/cursor related events can work on objects in both 2D and 3D, for example and only requires a handful of classes to use. There is a Lemur Gem (small tutorial example) for that if you are ever curious.
I read this in my spare time, but not because it may be I’ll need to use it. Rather, in order to compare my solution with yours. Writing my own GUI gives me some fun.
Amazing! keep working!
There can’t be a dungeon game without doors locked by keys! So let’s do it here:
You can see a basic model of a keyhole in front of you and a key on the floor.
And now something about ‘programming the dungeons’:
To the right, in editor I have a simple line that connects keyhole with the doors. Both are treated as 2-state-machines, this simple line moves (M) the state from first machine ([XY:3|6,EE,KH]) to the second ([XY:3|7,NO,D]) without negation (0).
There are other types of ‘programs’: timers, locks and one, that I’m not sure how to translate: Object A is checking the state of B and if the state is different it switches to B’s stat after certain amount of time.
2 Likes
It’s time to spawn some mobs. Our testrobo is the first one!
We have our own GameTime controller with pause ability, so the animations needs to be paused when we enter game menu. Overriding AnimControl is not a solution, too much work. I need the pause to be made without any effort from my side.
I do it in simple way. From the begining… all objects on game scene are placed with some order: walls, pillars, ceiling and floor on _structNode, items on _itemNode, ‘on-wall-items’ on _wallNode etc. Because only Items and obejects placed on walls can have controllers I made an extended node with overriden updateLogicalState, which simply does not call its super method. I don’t like to waste CPU, so the idea is simple. Now, I need to AnimControl’s update be executed only when the GameTime is not paused, so I made a similar trick with node - mob’s node calls its super method only when the GameTime is running.
In the meantime I solved the problem introduced here: Skullstone - a dungeon crawler game - #28 by FrozenShade
How to detect an animated object as fast as possible? Trying to check if there is an AnimControl is not an solution, UserParam is not an solution, both are slow because they need to check too much (list, parent etc). The most simple solution is to mark such geometries with special name - if the shadow renderer find a geometry with name starting from char ‘_’ it will render the shadow, otherwise it will do all it’s optimization tests.
Some time ago I read that realtime computer graphics is essentially one giant dirty hack. I agree
4 Likes
Nothing special this time, just a simple pathfinding algorithm… see the map.
Now, as we wrote before, we are working on mobs. It’s not only models and animations, but AI as well, and pathfinding is just a part of it. Simple AI will allow mob to choose an destination point and walk to that point. When he see the player, he will ‘aggro’ and try to chase/attack the player. Every damage will increase aggro points, that points will decrease over time, which will allow mob to just give up.
Mobs will have ‘emotions’, a special animations triggered in certain situations. For example: if the mob does nothing he would animate ‘boring’ emotion, if he have aggro and see the player but can’t reach him (the player is behind the closed doors) he would be ‘angry’.
This time I played with graphics once again. Nothing special to be honest, just an mob status. I was able to extend my base Gui component so it can work like an status graphics. It shows the actual hp bar (temporary version) and damage the mob was taken. Custom shader makes the damage slowly disappearing and floating up, till it is not visible at all, so I can have a nice effect without repainting the texture.
Here is the SS:
2 Likes
@FrozenShade : I like what you did with the lights and shadows. I already see an “atmosphere” in your screenshots.
Which kind of mobs are you looking for ? Maybe there is one I made for my game which may fit in yours. Some kind of demon with a hole in the chest/abdomen. Just PM me if you want to and I’ll show you.
Finally, the deferred rendering:
http://postimg.org/image/u7dlrp90j/
It looks even better than on forward rendering. Ignore the bug with the light ray in the hole, it is fixed already. The difference in performance is not visible all the time but only on well lightened places of course.
Looks nice,
Sooo,
what defered system are you using?
Any chance in getting some code for it ? XD
I’ll think about sharing. For now the code is too dirty and it requires custom renderers on the java side.
I don’t understand the question.
Well deferend shading, vs deferend rendering? How do you handle transparencies, ect 
Just interested in what choices you made.
Transparencies?
The first pass is made the same way as in standard JME rendering, using renderViewPortQueues for a special viewport with MRT framebuffer, so the Opaque and Transparent buckets are used. I write all the buffers at the same time and use m_AlphaDiscardThreshold the same way as it is used in standard shaders. Finally I have diffuse, specular and other maps drawn - because the transparent objects acts the same way as before, the maps have informations for visible pixels.
After that, in the second pass I just draw an quad or sphere (depends on the light source distance) for every light, using maps I draw in the first pass.
Notice the roots - it is a flat surface with transparency placed on the wall.
I did few last fixes, added glow map generation in first pass to eliminate the postQueue render in BloomFilter - it results in rewriting that filter.
We tested everything on the following machine:
System: WinXP
Java 1.7.something
CPU: Core 2 Duo E8400
GPU: GTX 750 Ti
Resolution: 1280x1024
Test 1: empty room, player’s light (no shadows), one torch (no shadows)
FPS: ~160
Test 2: corridor, player’s light (no shadows), 2 torches (no shadows), 1 torch (shadows), one monster with 50k verts + bones, HW Skinning
FPS: >100
Test 3: corridor, player’s light (no shadows), 3 torches (shadows), 5 monsters with 50k verts + bones, HW Skinning
FPS: >75
Test 4: corridor, player’s light (no shadows), 3 torches (shadows), 4 monsters with 50k verts + bones, Software Skinning
FPS: >33
We know that 50k verts for monster is an extreme example, so we choose 15k as the upper limit. But we know that there is possible to make very nice models with even less tan 2k verts.
An little explanation what’s going on with torches - why there are torches with and without shadows: it depends if there is an moving or animating object near the torch. If nothing is changing, then there is no point to generate shadowmap every frame. On tests 3 and 4 all 3 torches were forced do update their shadowmaps because of the monsters walking next to them.
3 Likes
Here is an improved arrows panel:
Here we have two tabs: you can switch the view between arrows and character’s action skills.
Every character can have 3 action skills, like heal, rage, fortress etc.
There is no good place for them on the screen - the bottom of the screen is reserved for floor, we cannot take more space next to the party area, so the only solution is to share the arrows area. Switching between characters will change the visible skills.
5 Likes