I'm currently in the process of developing a very basic 3D OpenGL game in C++ as part of a small college project. We don't get a lot of insight from the teachers however, and only very limited documentation, as well as a small timeframe, so I'm kind of a little lost here at the moment.
My game is a tank battle on an orthogonal plane that pretty much looks exactly like the image I sketched below. Each tank (A and B) can be controlled by a different player, and each one can shoot projectiles, which are supposed to influence the other tank's score upon collision.
My question is, what would be the simplest way of effectively implementing collisions for the tanks? (Tank vs tank, tank vs map boundaries and tank vs any kind of parallelepipedic object like the one in the center of the picture - and the same thing but applied to the projectiles shot from the tank turrets).
Ideally, without the need of using an external physics engine, but also accepted if the implementation can be done easily. At the moment, I'm solely using the GLUT library.
Download and integrate Box2D (http://box2d.org) into your project.
Unless your project is to implement a physics engine, then don't bother doing it yourself. Your time will be much better spent learning how to integratate libraries and how proper physics engines work.
You can then easily use a box collider for your tanks, circle for projectiles and 4 lines for your perimeter. You can create callbacks to notify you when a projectile has collided with another tank.
You will have to use forces and torques to move and rotate your tanks, rather than just updating their positions. But you would probably have to do that anyway if you were going to implement the physics yourself.
I'm interested in trying to create realistic fluids (water), for a 2D game. This game is similar to Terraria. I have heard about how you can slap a bunch of colliding particles on the scene and render over it and voila, realistic acting water.
Terraria uses tile based water, which I am not a fan of.. I want something more advanced.
I thought about using bullet 3D physics (box2d has limits I would hit). For non colliding particle effects, I am thinking about using something like SPARK, since I think that'd give me the best of both worlds.
The issue I am thinking about, is that each block is 16x16, so on a 1600x900 scene, there are about 5 thousand tiles.
So I need to tell the physics engine that these tiles are collidable. Of course, there are void tiles that are considered to be non collidable.
Does anyone have ideas on this? Language is C++, I doubt that's relevant though.
EDIT: i think i'm going to have to cave in and use grid based water. I suppose, in retrospect particle based just makes everything more difficult but for what gain?
Your question is about tiled fluids, but you seem to actually be asking about a particle based approach.
If that's the case, what you're looking for is "Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics", or SPH, which is a very popular technique for 2D and 3D fluid simulations in realtime situations.
Yes, it's basically just a particle system, with each particle responding to the forces in your environment (gravity, collisions etc.) in a reasonable (mathematically stable) way, combined with a constraint that they must stay a certain distance apart in order that the fluid is incompressible.
You can render the particles as points, if you have enough of them, or you can use them as a source for deriving a surface (for example using marching-cubes, though in 2D I wouldn't worry about that).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothed-particle_hydrodynamics
It has the advantage of being relatively easy to code, and indeed to accelerate on a GPU.
Indeed I think they're probably a better approach than trying some kind of tile-based approach, and you get some more interesting results, such as spray kicking up, waves kicking against the edges of objects, etc. It's not too hard to get something pleasing working, I'd give it a go.
I am working on a simple 2D openGL project. It contains a main actor you can control with the keyboard arrows. I got that to work okay. What I am wanting is something that can help explain how to make another actor object follow the main actor. Maybe a tutorial on openGL. The three main things I need to learn are the actor following, collision detection, and some kind of way to create gravity. Any good books or tutorials to help get me in the right direction would be great.
You could use a physics library like Chipmunk Physics, which lets you attach springs and things between the two objects and detect when they hit each other and other things.
A pre-rolled library would be good, but the concepts you describe are ones you need to know if you are going to do any sort of game programming anyways:
A simple way to make one actor follow behind another is to have the lead actor store its position every time it moves. Feed these positions to a trailing actor with a delay of a few values - the longer the delay, the further behind they travel. Simple, but doesn't handle dynamic collision (other actors moving the block collision.)
Collision detection in 2D can simply be axis aligned (AA) bounding boxes. Search for this and you'll see the 4 ifs or so that are needed.
Gravity is just adding a fixed velocity (usually down) to every object every game loop. This is constant acceleration which is exactly how gravity works.
There are a lot of 3d game engines around, does anyone with experience with them have advice on which one would likely be able to handle these (arbitrary) requirements?
opengl
mac/pc
1000x1000km terrain
1000 towns varying in size from 10
to 1000 buildings
128 people in any one location
MMO type networking (no solo play)
physics engine including airfoil (ie airplanes)
c++ with optional scripting
You can look at Ogre3D. It supports OpenGL/DirectX, Mac/Linux/Windows, written in C++. But it is not game engine, it is 3D rendering engine. You can integrate other networking/physics engines with Ogre.
I'd like to suggest the Torque Game Engine. Some of the things you're asking for aren't really possible (as others have pointed out), but are problems that have to be tackled in a round about way (like faking the airfoil physics). The Torque engine would be a good starting place for you. There's also a 2D version called Torque Game Builder which might be easier to start with.
www.garagegames.com
A plug for openscenegraph, has all of that plus paeed terrains, level of detail LOD etc - it's used by flightgear flight simulator as well as a lot of commercial and military simulators
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I'm looking for some good ideas for a simple 3d graphics program as my final project for an intro to computer graphics class. As for some background information, we'll be using opengl and will have a little over a month to work on it, so nothing too far-fetched. The simpler and "prettier" looking, the better. It does, however, require some sort of interface that the user can interact with (so a very simple game or similar is a good idea) and must be 3D.
My only idea so far is maybe a 3D version of Tetris (google for some examples).
Edit: I ended up going with 3D Tetris. For a less than a month's worth of time, you can see what I came up with here.
A 3D text/code editor. Text is 3D, errors stand out, code indentations not only indent, but protrude on z axis, pages/files are 3D and can be flipped like a ringpad.
Probably not useful, but fun and more interesting than a game IMO.
In university, for my parallel programming course, I did an openGL/MPI implementation of Conway's Game of Life. It was quite interesting. Wish I still had the code around somewhere. The advantage of using open GL is that you can lay out the grid in different orientations rather than a flat grid. Remember, code doesn't exist until it's checked into source control.
Putting some physics in makes it more interesting. How about implementing Labyrinth (the maze toy where you are supposed to guide a ball from the starting point to the goal by tilting it).
EDIT: Erik told me it's called Labyrinth.
A 3D minesweeper game similar to this one.
Rubik's cube.
Look at http://www.contextfreeart.org/ ... write something similar, but for 3d.
If you've ever played Missile Command I belive that this could be a good project to '3d-ify'.
Try a chicken crossing the road game.
You will probably need to demonstrate the bare minimum of:
textures
lighting
animation
interaction
collision detection
Do not include even simple physics if there are no marks for it. Prioritise tasks based on the marking scheme. Get something simple working first and back it up :)
Honestly it's actually pretty easy to load up a bunch of animated models and set up a simple first person shooter. I mean, to get a generic thing working you don't need all that much:
Either load and display a heightmap or a BSP tree as the level.
Load and render some simple MD2 models (keyframe animation, low amount of polys and simple format).
Draw a simple hud.
Ray/AABB intersection, every time the user clicks you'll need to cast a ray from the center of the screen and see if it intersects an the bounding boxes of the enemies.
Simple FPS camera system.
The above is pretty doable in a month for as far as I'm concerned. (It's probably doable in a week if you already know some of the stuff).
I tried to do a 3D Asteroids for a class once. I never completed the gameplay part, since it was a graphics class. The ship could move around, as could the asteroids, but there was no collision detection. The ship and the asteroids had 3D textures applied to them, and the asteroids were built out of ellipsoids, so they were actually 3D. The gameplay was all 2D, though.
How about one of those games that are a wooden maze with a ball rolling around the top. You tilt the board and try to get the ball round the maze without falling down the hole? It has the advantage that it's relatively simple to get started, but you could probably think of some extensions if you have time.
If you're looking for a true university size task, mine was to produce a small helicopter "game" where you could take off from an aircraft carrier in an ocean and fly around with some environmental effects, moving water etc. i.e. nothing too complicated. As another example, the task set for the year previous to mine was a little sans-opponent racing game.
I would worry that you may loose marks with tetris as it sounds like little would be done on the z-axis and may come across a little too 2d though it obviously depends on your brief.
Anyway, these will give you the chance to experiment with the basic OpenGL features such as fog, lighting, geometry, textures and some basic movement physics & collision detection/response.
Further on this, though often beyond the scope of such a university sized task you could then take this further add nicities such as animated geometry (e.g. people), environment mapping, reflections, shadows, particle systems, shaders, perhaps a heightmapped island.
Rewrite Blocks 3D. The graphics on this project look horrible now. I remember playing this game (or one like it) on a 386 with wireframe graphics... awesome. The game is basically 3D tetris.
I would check Panda3D or Pygame.
Panda3D is probably close to what you are looking for, and one idea that always works is to put the user's face in the main character or object. 3d-pong with the player's face? Use something unexpected... like a tetris made of burgers instead of bricks.
I love little self-organising alife applications like boids. They can be fun to code and always benefit from a nice UI, especially 3D ones. User input can modify aspects of the environment as well as moving around/through the environment.
I like exoplanets. Go read up on them. On Wikipedia and http://exoplanet.eu there's a lot of information. Astronomers and public outreach people could always use fresh 3D animations showing how the Doppler effect works, or how the planet transiting in front of the star makes it for example 0.5% dimmer.
Or, what I work on, is how when the planet passes behind its star. At Earth we receive just a teeny bit less infrared from that star. The user could adjust the orbit, size of planet, etc. and see how that affects what astronomers see. It could be fun, simple enough to do, and unlimited potential in extending the work for nicer textures, slick lighting effects, etc., and you could end up with something to contribute to science education.
I'd be making such 3D animations myself, if I weren't busy helping crunch numbers for the actual science. I'll be jealous!