KohKae Engine

[AnonymousTipster]

Well, your engine is definitely a good start, and still works even if you forget to copy the Art directory over (oops ) It lags a little every now and then (looks like vis. lag), i'm assuming that this is because they're unswizzled RAM textures?

Here is the ThrottleX 0.2 source code:
--rm by monkey--
Please post when you've got it so I can remove the file from my server.
The makefile links lpng and lz, but I don't think these are needed for 0.2, so can be removed if you don't have the libs installed.
I hope you can extract some sort of usefullness out of it. Most physics stuff is labelled with 'physics' so just search for that.

[Produkt]

AT... would you be Interested in making an extention to ThrottleX?

have you heard of a game called track mania? its like throttleX but its based on a more fast paced idea.I'd be happy to do the levels.

If not, how about a racing game?

[PSmonkey]

Got it AT. Feel free to delete.

Yeah the lag is the textures. Its rendering two cubes both have 2 32bit textures (one is 32x32, other 256x128) in ram unswizzled. :P

I will fix that this weekend by adding in a memory manager for vram & add in the pspsdk fast swizzle command.

Actualy if you think about that math wise, it's easy to see how crazy it is.

its 2 6 sided cubes rendering a 16x16x4+256x128x4.

[AnonymousTipster]

AT... would you be Interested in making an extention to ThrottleX?

have you heard of a game called track mania? its like throttleX but its based on a more fast paced idea.I'd be happy to do the levels.

If not, how about a racing game?

I actually play TM:N a lot and have Sunrise too. I think it was a subconscious inspiration as the concept developed in my mind.
I have thought about doing a proper racing game, and I like the idea, but the engine needs tweaking and optimising first (still running at 333mhz). Also there's the issue of models. So far I've been too lazy to code an .obj loader, and ThrottleX (and any other 3D game) could really use one.
So, yes, I would like to do one, but not quite yet. I want to finish ThrottleX 0.3, and let people play with the editor, level downloads and high score tables for a bit. It may be an idea to code a racing game for KohKae once it's near completion.
I've also got that little project called Eclipse to work on too....oh, and there's a rhythm game idea stewing in my head too.

If only I could pause time for a bit


EDIT: @Monkey
I thought it would be the textures, as the blended texture is very large for such as small cube. Something you'll almost certainly want to look into is support for CLUT textures. It reduces colour fidelity, but can quarter the space needed, meaning you can squeeze more into VRAM.
One other thing you may already know; don't swizzle if the texture is in VRAM - it actually slows it down.

[PSmonkey]

EDIT: @Monkey
I thought it would be the textures, as the blended texture is very large for such as small cube. Something you'll almost certainly want to look into is support for CLUT textures. It reduces colour fidelity, but can quarter the space needed, meaning you can squeeze more into VRAM.
One other thing you may already know; don't swizzle if the texture is in VRAM - it actually slows it down.

Yeah, Actualy on iris I cheated. I would generate a 256 color palette from the image. I was not pleased with the results so I plan to add in suport for images with palettes.

Also really the textures are examples for the time being (ripped from mario bros nes). I had them because as a sample for the engine I am building a small game that will kind of be like tower building with tetris style blocks. You will recieve a score based on the hight of your tower subtracted by the side of the base (smaller base = more points). The game ends as soon as the tower starts to fall down. I'm also going to luminies it by allowing people to add their own theme. :P

It's a simple concept that will weight heavly on the ODE.

[AnonymousTipster]

Have you played Bontago? It's a game a little like your idea, but more fleshed out. The physics were done with Tokamak, a physics engine I happened to be very fond of, until the creators stopped working on it. I rallied them round to start again about a year ago, but they're gone again. I'm pretty sure Tokamak will just fade away, but Bontago is worth a look: http://www.bontago.com/

[PSmonkey]

Have you played Bontago? It's a game a little like your idea, but more fleshed out. The physics were done with Tokamak, a physics engine I happened to be very fond of, until the creators stopped working on it. I rallied them round to start again about a year ago, but they're gone again. I'm pretty sure Tokamak will just fade away, but Bontago is worth a look: http://www.bontago.com/

Yeah, actualy that is where part of the concept comes from. The other half is partly from a PC game called "trembling towers" wich kind of adds a puzzle feel to it.

I'm more thinking something that is kind of both which is kind of like tetris/jenga. So kind of like bontago but you more get tetris style shapes fed to you at random and you just have to keep building up the best you can. Yet also borrowing some of the feel of trembling towers (ie its 2d play vs 3d play like bontago).

[PSmonkey]

Small update notes. I am planning a new sdk/src release in a few days. Mostly it will add md2 suport, view frustum clipping class, at3 player & if i can get it sorted in time a simple texture page manager.

Also thinking to add a simple sprite animation system where you just load a image, give dimentions and set how fast you wish to run the animation. Should make adding animated 2d objects much easier.

Again anybody here is free to use the engine providing they note in the about page that it's running on KohKae. Ultimatly later I will add in a splash screen callback that can be called anywhere in the game (either intro, menu or help) that will state its the kohkae engine and what version.

[AnonymousTipster]

Sounds like it's coming along nicely.
Are you planning on adding a BSP format or another format that could be used for worlds? I was thinking about if I were to do a racing game based on kohkae, it would need to be able to load a world as the track, and then overlay the physics onto that, probably via a different file. IE, you have map.bsp and map.phy which go together to form the track.

The sprite system sounds good, might I suggest an option to set target co-ordinates for the sprite? Say you have a menu which you want to slide onto the screen, which is at x:-100, if you set the target to x:0 and time to 1, it would automatically animate the sprite so that it ends up at x:0 after 1 second.

The other thing i'd like to see is a nice text renderer. At the moment, flib is good, but can't do real-time rendering, so you'd have to render all the glyphs to textures first.

Keep up the good work, and I might have a play with the engine once I've got some time away from my current projects.

[PSmonkey]

Sounds like it's coming along nicely.
Are you planning on adding a BSP format or another format that could be used for worlds? I was thinking about if I were to do a racing game based on kohkae, it would need to be able to load a world as the track, and then overlay the physics onto that, probably via a different file. IE, you have map.bsp and map.phy which go together to form the track.

The sprite system sounds good, might I suggest an option to set target co-ordinates for the sprite? Say you have a menu which you want to slide onto the screen, which is at x:-100, if you set the target to x:0 and time to 1, it would automatically animate the sprite so that it ends up at x:0 after 1 second.

The other thing i'd like to see is a nice text renderer. At the moment, flib is good, but can't do real-time rendering, so you'd have to render all the glyphs to textures first.

Keep up the good work, and I might have a play with the engine once I've got some time away from my current projects.

Q3 Bsp file format will be added in. Its on my list of todo things. I just have not jumped yet since it will take a few days to rewrite and port my stuff from iris over (I made things messy, plus iris is in C, kohkai is c++).

I want to get the physics engine tied into the q3 map as well but worried it will bottleneck too many things since collission detection on a q3 map is rather costly. So I might do your idea with an external file format that contains object & plane data for the ODE system.

Your idea for sprites has been noted and will go in.

I also want a nice font system in soon. I am looking at all options.