DudleySoft.org

Someone was writing on the XNA forums at Microsoft about trying to get a poser figure imported into XNA, well since I’ve got Poser 5 and V3 (Victoria 3) that I would try importing her into HDL as a test to see what happens when you try to use a really high polygon model in XNA. First though I had to get the data exported in FBX format, long story short, since this is the most useful part. Download Autodesk’s FBX Convertor, export the model as a Wavefront OBJ file, then convert it to an ASCII FBX file (this is important for the next step), next you need to edit the texture paths, I found it easiest to pull the textures out of their respective directories and store them in a directory local to the FBX file. I replaced the paths with the new path to the textures (since it made them relative to the FBX file, and not pointing at the original files).

Once I’d done that I loaded the model as normal in the game, first using the basic effect shader, because I wasn’t sure it would work, then once I’d got the model working I decided to ramp it up a bit, and render it into both the shadow map and the reflection, then just to make check I added an FPS counter to the title page. Here’s the resultant screenshot.

I had to increase the scale since it appears that poser uses the same scale as my world does, so she’s 40 times actual size, you can see her reflected in the water, and her shadow behind the boat, you can also spot that she’s shadowing herself as well.

So there we go, rendering a poser model not once, but 3 times in XNA, and running at 62fps (possibly more since the update rate is fixed)

I decided that the old title page didn’t really reflect the game as I envision it, so I’ve changed it, and made it a bit more dynamic, instead of the helicopter sitting on a static helipad, I’ve move it out onto the Xena and created a scene that’s a bit more animated. It also tests my camera curve code that will be used in the cutscenes in the game engine.

Here’s what the new screen looks like:

Of course a still picture doesn’t really do it justice, so I put together a little video of the new engine in action, I’ve also replaced the temporary music I was using with something a bit more martial.

Another feature added to my engine, I was never entirely pleased with the water effect in HDL, yes, the ripples and warping of the texture looked alright, but it really needed to reflect the environment, however since I’d designed a top-down game, I hadn’t added a sky-box, so I had to create one first, now that I’ve done that, I’m able to render reflections.

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I’ve updated my software page with some demos of games I’ve written or worked on in the past, visit the software page from the page menu on the right to see screenshots and information about each game.

Okay, I’ve found out what was causing the shadows to break, when you begin a sprite batch it sets up the RenderState in a format that is suitable for rendering sprites, however this isn’t suitable for rendering 3D. Read the rest of this entry »

A quick update today, I’ve created a couple of new models for the game, first up is your support ship, The Xena (an alternative pronounciation of XNA), most missions will start from the back of this ship, currently it’s added as an object on the object map, however it’s not been designed to be used as such so it will vanish under certain circumstances because it overflows a tile. Here’s a view from the deck of the Xena

The next image shows two tank models, the tank is quite complex and probably has more polygons than are really neccessary, however I’m concidering doing this for all models so that if need be I can use them in cut-scenes using the game engine, if I didn’t model them with a reasonable level of detail then they wont hold up to closer inspection. Anyway here’s a shot with two tanks on it, I have to zoom right out to get both on screen, so they’re pretty small, but you can see that they both self shadow, much easier than on the helicopter, due to the speed of the rotor rotations.

Well that’s it for today, I’ll be back later with more shots and progress reports.

Well I’ve finally gotten around to putting together a little video of the game in action, not much to see at the moment, just me flying around over the landscape for 30 seconds, you can see that I’ve got inertia in now, the helicopter takes a while to speed up and slow down.

The speed shown in the bottom left is the actual speed of the helicopter, the scale is 1 unit = 1metre, the speed of the helicopter is calculated in metres per second, the movement uses the current time step times the distance divided by 1000, so no matter what speed the game runs at the helicopter moves at the appropriate speed, every object in the game will be similarly setup so that the whole thing feels natural and maintains a steady pace.

Still haven’t tested it on the XBox 360 yet, should be getting my Creators Club membership on Wednesday, so try it then, I’m not expecting any problems, but you never know.

I mentioned before about adding shadows, well the process went a lot smoother than I expected, after a few false starts I got my models loaded using my new shader, and got the scene to render using the new shader, then I got the shadow maps rendering, finally I was able to combine them and tweak the values until I got something that looked pretty good.

Below are two screenshots that show the new version with shadows, I also added a new title page, I wasn’t happy with the repeated tile filling the background, so I built a little helipad and control tower scene for the title page, with the addition of shadows it looks really good now.

Here’s the first screen (click thumbnail for full size)

And here’s the ingame engine, not a very exciting view, but it does show the new shadows running in the engine.

Next up will be to get it running on the Xbox 360, I dont envision any problems since it supports Shader Model 2.0 and there’s no PC specific code in there, the only question I have is if it supports R32F format display buffers since I’m using one for the shadow map, I dont think it’ll be a problem, but you never know.