Saturday, December 15, 2007

Decade Meets ODE

Time yet again ticks by. No matter now much I try I can't stop it. As you can see Novermber was a quiet month in the life of Decade. Due to personal reasons I did not have much if any time to program, however last week I returned to Decade and decided that it was long overdue to add some physics to the engine.

Having messed around with ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) a few years ago I decided that I would start with this free physics engine. I am trying to use the same approach in adding the physics as I did with the graphics. I have implemented an extrapolation layer between the game engine and the physics engine with the hope that in the future I can add support for other physics engines without having to change too much of the game code.

Refreshing myself with the theory of ODE last week I have now started to modify Decade. Up to now all transformations, rotations etc.. in Decade were stored as Eulars. ODE rotations are matrix based so rather than have converter functions to change between Eular->Matrix and Matrix->Euler I modified the Decade core so that each object builds its own Model View Matrix. The Projection and View matrices are also build and handled by Decade. Although a little more complicated to code and read this approach does have some advantages. For an object which is static in the world its matrix can be built once, reused time and time again and doesn't have to be updated until the object moves. Using the glRotate, glScale and glTranslate functions this matrix was built for each object every frame.





Now that the basics of ODE have been added I will continue on this course building my Physics Layer. I will create some simple rag doll physics or a vehicle which will introduce me to the topic of joints.
After basic physics is added to Decade I really must invest some time to complete my to do list of improvements on current features. This includes
  • Properly fixing cracks in terrain
  • Priority Rendering Queue
  • Octree V Quadtree
  • ROAM Terrain
  • Finish Shadow Volumes and Parallel Split Shadow Maps

and after that I need to continue with my future to do list

  • Scriptable Particle System and Editor
  • Planet Generation
  • Some small tech games (Golf, racing etc...)

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