Screenshots of some of my work at AIGamedev.com

Many thanks to Alex Champandard, it has been (still is) great to work with you.

Framework1 / Quake3 level lightmaps

It is sunday, instead of doing something fun (which I am regretting now that I see that it's 23:41 ...) I added lightmap support to the Quake3 rendering part of the framework. 20 years too late, but still, it looks kinda cool...

Can't wait to halfway finish the framework to start using it for 'not old hat' graphics related experiments.


Lightmapped:


Detail texture only:

Lightmap texture only:

Detailt+Lightmap textures:

The Lightmaps of the level (all 128x128):

Rendering Framework1 first video, Streaming Quake3

Aside from working on Animation and AI related things at AIGamedev.com, which by the way just went live with a brand new website :), I am slowly working on an XNA rendering Framework.

I figured it would be a good and time efficient idea to write a Quake3 map loader this time, since much content is directly available, All the nice geometry can then be used as a basis for graphics experiments.

This is the first version that successfully loads Quake3 levels, it took approximately 24 hours, it uses only colored vertices, but it already does something cool, leafs and their faces are streamed as needed and not pre-loaded, and the streaming usese Generics and Reflection and is Vertex format agnostic, of course streaming maps of this size (~100k vertices) does not really make sense since they could all fit nicely in one very small vertex/index buffer, but still, one of the goals of the framework is to focus on streaming and parallelization (think submission engine), so the code is being designed around that, with the Quake3 levels providing the data.

More technical details and source code will come as appropriate, for now, have fun with the (not very exciting colored vertices) video, at least it shows how only the pre-baked radiosity in vertex colors is already enough to create a sense of nice lighting.




References I used for the bsp format and loading:

• http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/quake/quake3.html
• http://graphics.stanford.edu/~kekoa/q3/
• http://code.google.com/p/bsp-renderer/
  

The nice test maps are from:

• OpenArena
• http://www.users.on.net/~justonefix/

3D Transform-Matrix multiplication reference

There is a known and well documented confusion about the order of matrix multiplication, row major, column major, c++ memory layout....
In general you just need to pay a bit of attention to detail to get it under control, once for each new library or SDK or combination thereof you get to deal with.

I dug up a small reference document I wrote some time ago, and added to it how XNA handles matrices since I am doing a bit of XNA development.
It is not complete so if you would like to add to it I will gladly send you the OpenOffice original.
If you find I wrote anything wrong please let me know.

Rocket science Tic-Tac-Toe testbed

It has been some time since the last post,

I have been busy working on the AIGamedev.com sandbox, some of the work was related to A*, Hierarchical A*, terrain clustering, pathfinding, Animation mirroring, Locomotion planning ...

I also had the time to start my 'own private course' in academic Machine Learning thanks to the many good online resources and video lectures.

Remotely related, and since I decided to share much of the things I do, no matter how simple or meaningless I might find them, here is a Tic-Tac-Toe AI testbed, which started as an interview 3 hour coding test, but then received some fun additions, namely an Alpha-beta minimax AI, which is adapted from Steve Chapel's code and a Reinforcement learning value iteration AI (my own 1 hour exercise to apply one of the very basic machine learning techniques)

http://jadnohra.net/release/TicTacToeTestbed_rev28.zip