Daedalus Spaceship Simulator

[Madman07]

The Daedalus Spaceship Simulator is a game based on the well known TV series "Stargate". As the title say, the point of the game is to simulate the BC-304 class ship called "Daedalus" (and maybe more, later).

Game is made by my friend (Iziraider) and I. While he's responsible for modeling (and texturing), I'm working on programming, gui, sounds and other. Occasionally, Lt_C is helping us with texturing (for example a game episode satellite). This game has been started due to the lack of a Stargate space game. Garry's Mod didn't allow us to do it because of the map size limit and lack of C++ code acces, so we've decided to make our own separate game. In time, the game became for me a learning point - I've already learned a lot of C++, shaders and some algorithms.

The player will be able to explore space, control the weapons, shields, and other equipment of the Daedalus, and be able to walk around inside the ship in a first-person perspective.


The game is built using DestinyEngine, my custom game engine composed of these freeware and open-source sub-engines:
- Ogre3D + OIS
- MyGUI
- OpenAL + OgreAL
- Newton Game Dynamics



Planned features:
- ship flight mechanics (75%),
- ship interior (1%),
- entering and exiting ship (0%),
- weapons (0%),
- shields (0%),
- hyperspace (10%),
- asgard transporter (0%),
- ring transporter (0%),
- hangar bays (0%),
- F-302's (25%),
- full scale procedural planets (25%),
- sun shaders (40%),
- game sattelite (100%),
- light nodes (90%),
- material shaders (25%),



For those of you, who would like to take a little adventure on the Daedalus, Iziraider has prepared a simple demo of the bridge made in Unity3D Web Player. The bridge is work in progress, and he will try to keep it up to date as he finishes new parts of it.

http://dzsekeb.hostoi.com//Egyeb/WebPla ... layer.html



Lastly, a short word from us:

Those of you who are interested in helping us, and have the necessary skills (modeling, texturing, c++ coding), feel free to let us know

Those, who would like to post a comment and\or observe the thread, please don't suggest me using already made stuff. Ppl from some other community often suggested me "use unity, it's better", or "use existing space engine, it will be faster" just because they wanted to play it as fast as it's possible regardless to us. I'm having fun from making most of things myself, even if they will take much time. Also, I'm a person, that like to do 100 stuff at the same time, thus I will be posting here screenshoots of different things often



Screenshots from the curent state of the game:

[betajaen]

Very Cool! I've been watching Atlantis Season 5 on DVD recently too.

Will you be doing any of planets/solar systems in the Stargate universe, as well as expand to different types of ships? Prometheus, Atlantis, Ha'tak, Density, Aurora-class, Wraith, etc.

[Alexiss]

Ahah this is funny, I finished watching an episode of Stargate involving the Daedalus not 2 minutes ago, and I come across this.

Very cool project, looking forward to see how it evolves.

[duststorm]

Looks nice.
This game would be a good candidate to use the ROAM planet rendering engine

[Madman07]

@betajaen, Right now we're working only on Daedalus (however I would love to see Prometheus here). We also have an replicator ship, that could be used as enemy ship. No futher plans rather than "make daedalus working" and "make huge planets" right now

@Alexiss, thanks!

@duststorm, in fact, I've resigned from such engine after seeing it's incredibly complex code. Instead, I've started developing my custom planets (involving triangles instead of quads)


Few Interesting fact I've forgot:
#1 Interior and outerior for daedalus is splited into 2 separate SceneManagers and into 2 separate Newton physics worlds.
#2 We've got a model for Ancient Defence Satelite as well (not uvmapped, we really need such guy!).
#3 Newton is working without any wrappers
#4 I had to write NewtonSerializer to serialize collision model from obj files just for that game.

[Nikitron]

Good idea to make a game based on the franchise StarGate.

I like it wanted to make a game based on the StarGate Universe, when the series was closed, but did not succeed in this. I hope you get to finish the project, and we will rejoice this game.

[Madman07]

The project is moving on (even, if I'm not posting much info here). It got completly rewriten. I've implemented Gorila Overlay, GorilaConsole, loading screens, settings menu, and much more!
Today's innovation - LensFlare and Bloom (all thanks to Ogre users!). Fo some reason, Bloom also works as Glow (visible on satelite), magic?

[Madman07]

Let there be a planet!
I've got it (finally!) working. Code was rewrited 3 times, and it's still extremely messy, but it's working. As you can see, I'm using triangles instead of quads - they are easier for me than quads. Just please don't look on FPS count and tris count (I'm running on old 7600GS without any horizon and frustum culling (however I've already have them written, they just need to be optimized to do less GPU update cycles)). Few days ago I've tested Newton TreeCollision - it works perfect even with that huge planet (it blocked every satellite I was bombarding planet with ). It seems it's working just like it should. A little screen from a planet with our nice, Sun

[scratchyrice]

Looking good, Keep it up! I am a fan of simulators so it will be interesting to see where this goes!

Cheers

Scratchy (Alex)

[Madman07]

Random shots of the day: new, nice planet atmosphere (thanks to Petrocket) and BC-304 ship orbiting planet.

[Dzsek]

UV maps are crap. Tell your lazy ass modeler to move his butt.

[Xavyiy]

UV maps are crap. Tell your lazy ass modeler to move his butt.

We better tell some moderator to ban you.

[Madman07]

UV maps are crap. Tell your lazy ass modeler to move his butt.

We better tell some moderator to ban you.

This is actually my lazy modeler. I'm embarrassed because of him -.-

[Xavyiy]

This is actually my lazy modeler. I'm embarrassed because of him -.-

Haha, cool then! =)

So yes, Dzsek move your butt

[Madman07]

Shader update. Finally, I've decided to port shaders to GLSL (since I dropped support for CG). So i took a shot for main metal shader. Since Blinn, Phongs are to weak for it (but good for plastic), I went into Cook-Torrance lighting model. Shader is at 75% finished. It can make far things darker, and light calculations is (probably, as far as I understand it) done per Vertex, but it still looks nice. Light direction is based on normal map, light reflecity on specular map. It seems reasonable to add one more texture map to tweak roughness size via texture (and make it universal). I might be putting it on WIKI, whenever i will finish it

However, textures suck - I'm not an texture artist so I took random metal texture, mad specular (grayscale) and normal (height to norm converter) thus it can looks a bit like a concrete rather than metal. If anyone wanna do a decent set of textures, let us know! Reflections may look a bit off, because for some reason (for that material, for other it worked) camera position don't want to change reflections position, idk why.

Also, anyone knows, why stencil shadows doesn't work for me (also with default ogre shader)? Shadow should make things darker, but my shadows actually light things up -_-



Oh, and shoot from exactly same shader and exactly same material from Typhon GLSL Shader Editor. Why it's looking a bit better?

[bstone]

Also, anyone knows, why stencil shadows doesn't work for me (also with default ogre shader)? Shadow should make things darker, but my shadows actually light things up -_-

Stencil shadows are picky. The first thing to double check is that your meshes have edge lists. Without them stencil shadows do not work. Then you have to chose the shadow lighting model between additive and multiplicative. The additive one requires all your materials with shaders to indicate the ambient, per light, and decal passes explicitly. So try multiplicative first.

Oh, and shoot from exactly same shader and exactly same material from Typhon GLSL Shader Editor. Why it's looking a bit better?

This one looks like per-pixel lighting whereas your screenshot have flat areas with almost uniform specular intensities which implies per-vertex lighting. But I don't know how you managed to get that with one and the same shader. One other thing might be a difference between the light source (i.e. point light as in the "better looking" picture and direct light as in your screenshot).

Those are my guesses.

[Madman07]

Stencil shadows are picky. The first thing to double check is that your meshes have edge lists. Without them stencil shadows do not work. Then you have to chose the shadow lighting model between additive and multiplicative. The additive one requires all your materials with shaders to indicate the ambient, per light, and decal passes explicitly. So try multiplicative first.

Yes, meshes has edge list. I was testing it with both, addative and modulative - both give the same, highlight result. So, all my materials (each pass) need to have defined ambient, diffuse, specular and emissive parameters? If yes then it's caused problems, I've removed those declarations. I will try to add them back

This one looks like per-pixel lighting whereas your screenshot have flat areas with almost uniform specular intensities which implies per-vertex lighting. But I don't know how you managed to get that with one and the same shader. One other thing might be a difference between the light source (i.e. point light as in the "better looking" picture and direct light as in your screenshot).

They are the same shaders. Seems, that they (or actually it) is per pixel lighted, just light direction is calculated per vertex. Both are using point light. I suspect, that I may messed up something withing ogre light settings, I will recheck it again.

[Madman07]

Okey, I did fixed shader easily, some matrix was unnecessary, now it works flawlessly

However, I've stucked with shadows. I don't want to use stencil shadows (to expensive), and texture shadows are not for me (shadow caster cannot be a shadow receiver). Can anyone point me to some other shadowing technique? But no deffering shader - game is intended to be used also on older GPU's with AA.

[bstone]

Texture shadows can do shadows on the shadow caster. Search the forums for depth shadows and check out the SHADOWTYPE_TEXTURE_ADDITIVE(MODULATIVE)_INTEGRATED modes description in the Ogre's manual.

[Madman07]

I got them. They are working, but ofc not like they should. No proper shadows from point lights (even if I specify that it has to use 6 textures per point light). I got it working with spotlights, but again some weird problems (like shadow not always visible). Because shadows were damn slow (a 1024x1024 one spotlight is slowing down my hardware from 50 fps to 10) I switched to PSSM shadows + PCF (most of pixelation seems to be fixed now), but then I got weird cut planes (probably I defined switch planes not that like they should be).

Anyway, shadows are causing me headache. I'm still thinking about using precomputed lightmaps (or to give some feeling of dynamic scene, per-light lightmap, which would fix most of reflection and shadow things, except situations, when blast door are opening/closing (no proper shadowing trough them)). I'm also thinking about precomuting AO, or use SSAO (will require from me recoing it from CG to GLSL + provide neat FPS drop).

Also I believe I will have to use deferred rendering (I'm not sure it it will be easy to handle for example 20 models in visible part of scene x 10 lights give at least nice 200 passes, while deferring would create 30 passes).

Any suggestions for me?

[bstone]

No easy solutions. Shadows can be fixed. And make sure to use the integrated shadows because that eliminates the extra shadow pass(es). But 10 lights affecting many objects at once might not be good for the forward rendering pipeline. Deferred shading is not easily implemented and not without it's own limitations.

[bstone]

Also, the point lights in Ogre only use one shadow texture with a 120 degree FOV. So don't waste space on 6 textures when only one is used. If you will take the deferred shading path then you could implement point light shadows with cube textures for the optimal performance. The deferred shading requires a separate set of textures per light type as opposed to per light requirement with the forward rendering.

[Madman07]

For anyone interested within Cook-Torrance lighting shader, please visist my blog page (it contains full source code for GLSL):

http://madman07.ugu.pl/index.php?show=007_cont#wrapper