Back!!!

[aeon]

Hey everyone, long time no see...   It's me Aeon and I'm starting this thread to let everyone know I'm back to TV.  I have a few things I want to get going again, one is fixing some bugs and adding more to my Ammunition SDK (bbence, I'm still trying to get textures aligned properly, I haven't forgot about ya).

Some of you may know that I left TV in 2007(ish) to work with XNA.  While I love the simplicity of XNA I found myself having to do a TON of work to get an XNA engine worthy of even comparing it to TV.  Well, after 2 years in development and all I released it, called Reactor 3D.  Unfortunately all my hard work was pretty much for naught.  XBox Live Community Games tanked and is NOTHING like Microsoft promised the service would be when it launched.  I released a small 2d puzzle game called Alchemist.

Alchemist did pretty well on launch even though XBox Live Marketplace's New Arrivals list was broken when I launched it.  The first month I made a decent return but the following months its slowed to a crawl.  People say "Market more", other say "Get the word out, get your game reviewed" and I've done all that.  While I'm not hanging up my hat on XNA for good (I still have the source code to Reactor 3D and still work on it every once in a while) I have closed Reactor 3D to outsiders due to the fact that the Community Games service didn't do as well as everyone planned and I couldn't recruit more programmers to help work on the engine.  While it was a great learning experience I eventually realized it was WAY too much work for one guy to handle (or at least this guy).

So, with my new experience developing an XNA game engine I tip my hat off to Sylvain.  How on EARTH was he able to make TV what it is today I have no idea.  2 years of hard core development and my engine was still lacking a uniform lighting system, physics, and collision detection.  So it has made me appreciate TV that much more.

So now that I'm back, interested in TV again, my skills with XNA will probably come in handy.  One thing I want to do to TV is add MY landscape class to it.  Reactor 3D featured a Geoclipmapped terrain system and my first project coming back to TV will be to port that over.  Geoclipmapped terrain is heavy on shaders (SM 3.0) but allows for much more detailed landscapes and larger landscapes.  I'll post about this soon as I start implementing my landscape with TV.

So here's to my homecoming, I hope I wasn't missed terribly

[Raul]

hy there. good to have you back.

i have found Reactor3D web site some weeks ago but I had no idea it was yours

Anyway now that you are here: Welcome back.

[Zaknafein]

Nice to read what your experience with XNA has been. I'm sure many people that tried to make Community Games came to the same conclusion : not really worth the time and effort, and visibility way too poor. Hopefully things will change in the near future because I'm sure that's not how MS envisioned it. (for one thing user ratings should help)

I didn't know about Alchemist but I'll give it a shot!

And looking forward to your geoclipmapping stuff.

[Lenn]

Welcome back!

Sounds like you gained some serious and valuable experience there.

The geoclipmapped terrain system sounds great. It would really interesting to see how you would pull it off in TV3D. Not that I think it's impossible or anything, far from it, I looked into it once and almost started developing something similar, but it would have been overkill for my project so I just did some really efficient landscape paging instead. However, I'd be really interested to see you implement it. Looking forward to your future posts!

[aeon]

well, to compare...
A basic 1024x1024 terrain mesh rendered in XNA with 3 layer multi-texturing ran at 34fps (with vsync on and fixed time step to keep it at 60fps or under *required by xbox*).

So then I implemented a Quadtree CLOD terrain which I posted video of on Youtube.
60fps  (86fps with vsync off).  64x64 chunks of a 1024x1024 terrain mesh.

Then finally Geoclipmapping...
60fps  (214fps with vsync off)...   on a 4096x4096 terrain....

My system is an AMD Athlon X2 3600 with 2gb ram and a Geforce 8800 GTX.

So obviously the Geoclipmapped terrain out performed EVERY other method I tried to generate a huge sprawling landscape.  The only draw back is a very subtle morph between lod levels that you wouldn't really notice if you tweaked the distances and of course adding things to your terrain.  I'll see what I can come up with over the weekend porting my geoclipmapped terrain over to TV.   I can tell you it will rely on MDX and C# (MDX because TV doesn't support rendering arbitrary vertex data without grabbing the internal graphics device).

*EDIT*  Terrain patches were frustum culled where applicable.

[Zaknafein]

I would advise using SlimDX instead of MDX for internal objects and DirectX stuff with TV... It's more up-to-date and it's actually maintained, unlike MDX which has been completely abandoned in favour of XNA.

[aeon]

I would advise using SlimDX instead of MDX for internal objects and DirectX stuff with TV... It's more up-to-date and it's actually maintained, unlike MDX which has been completely abandoned in favour of XNA.

Noted, thanks Zak.

[Hypnotron]

Besides Ammunition, what about Freedom Star?  Will work on that resume using TV3D?  The Freedom Star website hasnt been updated in a couple of years it seems

[aeon]

Besides Ammunition, what about Freedom Star?  Will work on that resume using TV3D?  The Freedom Star website hasnt been updated in a couple of years it seems

indeed, once i get a few good artists freedom star will live once more.  I've still been working on space renders, but still after all these years lack decent ships