Garshasp Development Blog » Editor

Workshop Schedule

fassihi — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 07:22:10 +0000

The schedule for the workshops held by the Garshasp development team for the third Digital Media Festival in Tehran can be found here:

http://garshasp.ir/node/178

The Resource Loop

fassihi — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:23:20 +0000

One major task for the development of the necessary features in the engine which is being worked on currently is the resource management section, as part of the Seamlessness feature which is being added to the game engine. Resources being 3D mesh files, textures, sound files, animation files and etc. The seamlessness design breaks down the world into chunks which will be loaded and unloaded in real time as the player progresses through the levels. This should ideally help out in increasing the rendering performance, memory consumption and general cpu load due to processes related to AI, physics and animation.

This feature needs to connect to the resource management hooks and start getting tested. It will probably be the last major architecturally significant feature we’ve planned for at this stage of development. The most critical resources are related to graphics and we’re currently trying to investigate the mechanisms OGRE provides for handling resources. One major feature which is definitely necessary for this design is the background resource load/unload which OGRE supports in a separate application thread.

Necessary tools to be integrated for Seamlessness and Resource Management are buing built into the level editor (Iranvij) in parallel.

Implementing this feature properly needs great focus from the technical and artistic departments since it affects the processes and main workflows of both.

Behavior Tool – Seamlessness

fassihi — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 20:34:11 +0000

We have felt the need for a specific tool in our Editor for so long now. Something to enable us to focus on a specific character and tweak its properties. Whether its behaviors, animaiton, physics or any other property. We never quite dedicated the time to implemente the features we needed. However some bursts of inspiration struck me recently when I went over the Havok Behavior Tool which is a very nice and neat product.

Our plan for this week is to implement a few features in our editor, Iranvij, which will enable us to view a character in an isolated window, run the different animations with a time tracker and simulate this character alone to view the different behaviors from different states. This will be a big addition to Iranvij. The state chart for every character can be edited visually thanks to the new data driven Hierarchical Finite State Machines used for the characters and the visual graph features in our editor.

Another major feature which is being added to the game engine is the Seamlessness feature which will enable huge game worlds to be loaded and unloaded on the fly without any load screens halting the game experience. The main parts have already been implemented in the game engine, Zorvan, and now the necessary tools have to be added to Iranvij. This is going to be a big addition to the engine capabilities.