Some Good News and Some Bad...

So last weekend I discovered that something is wrong with my texture-coordinates in my model-class. I spent the saturday trying to find out where the problems, still haven't found it. Then I tried to workout the normals/lighting, turns out I still need to read up a bit on that subject though...

So then I turned to another thing I will be needing in order to create a good game engine for the iPhone, I'm talking about sound. My first though was to use the Apples' SystemSound, but there was some major limitations to that, such as not being able to use soundclips that are longer than 30 seconds and perhaps the biggest limitation, that SystemSound isn't played immediately but put in one of Apples' queues. So I decided to go with OpenAL. I found a couple of great tutorials that showed the basics, then I tried setting it up.

Right now I can load in a soundclip and have several different "sources/speakers" play that soundclip. I have a couple of more things I would like to add 3D sound, either using OpenALs or making my own. Oh yeah, I did another concept-sketch!

That's all for now, I really want to get the engine ready for production now!! Excpect more more info soon :)

Joakim Rosenstam

Concept Sketch!

I made a small sketch for my next project earlier today, expect more to come!







No coding update today!

Joakim Rosenstam

-- Posted From My iPhone

A small update

Hello dear Reader!

I've been working some more with the Engine ( still haven't figured out a name ) and I've started to work on a .obj model loader! So far it's pretty slow and the rendering of models still needs a bunch of optimizations, but I'm able to load a triangulated .obj file, with textureCoordinates and normals. I haven't started the work on lighting/normals, but all the info from the .obj is being loaded correctly into the engine.


As you saw on the screenshots in my last update, I got particleEmitters up and running. I will need to rewrite them too use VBOs. Same thing goes for the models. I feel like my framework is growing bigger and bigger, which is great, but I will need to make sure everything works and is easy to use.


When I'm done with models, lighting and sound, the framework is usable and I will try to make something cool in it! I got a few ideas.. Feel free to send me an email if you have any questions about the engine or if you just feel lonely and need someone to send cute mails to!

That's all for now, will try to start post more regular updates. Thanks for reading and showing intrest in my work, I'm out!

Joakim Rosenstam


-- Posted From My iPhone

Framework/Engine news!

Hello everyone, I spoke (very shortly) about the new "Framework"

I've been busy working on in the last update, I feel like it's time to show how far along I've come. First thing first, the framework has turned into something much closer to a game-engine then a framework so from now on I will refer to it as a Engine. I made the engine from the ground-up, I use a mix of C and Obj-C to create all the classes that I need.

I got a lot of help from two really good friends, Tommy Vågbratt and Arvid Binder

Ekedahl, and if you guys ever read this, you should know that I'm really thankfull for everything you taught me :). The first

thing I made were a vector and a matrix class, they aren't fully optimized but they are good enough for me. I then carried on with creating a core for the engine, I made alot of small utility classes such as color and vertex classes. I then carried on creating a camera class, and some other neat things to be able to get the most out of Open-GL.

At first I used the same setup on rendering as in the example of Open-GL that Apple provides

(a NSTimer that calls a specified function in a specified

time interval). I had some major problems with that though, I could not get the rendering over 20-30 fps, even when I specified a higher rendering frequency. I also read alot about the way/when NSTimer calls the function specified by the coder and I don't believe that this is a safe way to go for a game-engine.

The way I handle, update/render right now is fairly simple. On startup a second thread is started that updates and renders all game

data. This means that I can choose if I want a locked interval of update/render calls or if I simply want to update/render as fast as the iPhone/iPod can.

If you look close at the screenshots you will notice that the newer

ones miss the debugtext, this is a issue that I bumped into when switching to a multithreaded approach. Apperantly all uiobjects, such as

UILabel, have to be updated in the main-thread. So that is on my todo-list.

Well that pretty much everything so-far!

Am I keeping somethings hidden/unexplained?

Of course I am! There will be plenty of updates on my new project/projects, just wait for it :)

Joakim Rosenstam

And yeah, if you have any questions/comments/ideas

toss me an email

(joakim.rosenstam@hotmail.com)

and I will answer as fast as possible!