XVE: Modular Ship Building System

Modular Ship Building system.... Yeah, so I've played about with compute shaders and high res oceans for, well for too long, I do want my game to have a low-poly feel so I've returned to focus in that direction.

Today beginning my modular ship building system, I can build a ship to place into the play space out of discrete pieces.  Since I'm using an Entity Component System this is trivial, I just create the "ship" as a series of child entities of the one ship and each has a different model offset to just place the renderable where I want them.... Yes yes, lots of words, just go with me here.

I started with building out a Hull Model, then a bow and finally a stern, and set up a function to build a ship with a number of segments of hull capped with ... yes the bow and stern:

The result was extremely visually underwhelming:

However, it proves out four key piece of technology, first is my transform hierarchy code is working as expected the parent entity here positions all the sub-renderables.

The next is the entity creation utilities are working, with the components tagging bow and stern orienting the entity along the X axis as "Forwards".

Right in the middle is my new Obj loader and the vertex colour attributes; I've moved away from using a Texture map to look up the colour of a face, say from a texture like this:

I've moved to vertex colours, but may return to UV's and faces, we'll see when I reenable global lighting.

And the final piece of tech is my revamped ImGui display of all the entities in the scene; I'm looking at implementing a gimbal control for moving entities about more easily within a scene.  This leads to the next piece of tech I am going to look at which is a scene editor, I need more play space defined, so land masses, buildings, objective markers, a compass display and of course to be able to control these new ships.... Watch this space.

Home Engine - Blender Export & Model Loading

Some progress in my home engine has been had, first of all multiple geometry rendering through my fixing up and better understanding both render passes and descriptor sets.

All of this is nuts and bolts, what I want to get to; just like the DirectX 11 rendered version; is to play with 3D geometry and placing objects into a scene.

To this end my hand written geometry is no longer hacking it, and you will have seen from my raw game engine posts I did use Milkshape 3D.

Milkshape, lovely as it is to my eye, is not a modern well featured 3D suite and sadly does not let me easily plug into the geometry live within it (one can only export and perform post-processing).

To that end I delved into how one might write a Blender add-on to export your own format...

Long Story short, here's my text intermediate output from just such a plug-in written in python.

The plug-in is far from robust, I followed the lines of another open source plug in and applied my own, copying it into blender with a batch file and clearing the pycache each time I perform an edit.

But it is doing the job I initially want, and I get my own format of file output.

And indeed I can load these into my engine...

I can work on the axis for the data output and start to ensure my camera system from the main client works as expected in vulkan; since the maths here is exactly the same code I don't anticipate any issues.

This should free my mind up to think about a lighting system and to finally get back to where I was with the coloured cubes in the DirectX 11 version and ultimately onto a full scene.

I have four constant things in the world, a ground plane, a skybox and a center marker flag (showing X, Y and Z axis respectively) with a quartet of boxes in the center of the scene.  This is the test scene for the "world" loaded into the scene graph.  And it's where I want this to be this time next week perhaps.

Since progress has been much quicker now I'm past the deep dive into learning the initial set up of vulkan.

I can also appreciate much more why folks just pick up an off the shelf engine, I myself make little prototypes in Unreal Engine 4.  But this kind of denudes me of the walk through these technologies.

For the most part creating an engine like mine, which is planned to have solid shaded low poly vehicular combat, well it's a solved problem, so I'm enjoying following in a lot of well trod foot steps to better my understanding of the processing, memory, mathematics and challenges in writing a game engine.