[Mark]

Hey all,

I am delighted to say that I have been back working on Universe or Nothing in a "serious" way since early September. My wife is doing really well now, her illness is behind us and life has returned to normal.

While my wife was ill I still did a little development on UoN every week, and during that time I made some significant improvements to the modding system. I modularised much of the game's gameplay code and moved it into mods using a "plugin" system. Having this modular system makes it easier for me to add gameplay, and it also means that most of the game's source code will be available to modders.

Now my focus is on graphics programming. Up until this point (in the game) the 3D "world space" and the 2D UIs have been completely separate, rendered separately by different parts of the code, but the game requires there to be a deep integration. While much of the UI is 2D there are parts, like the spatial radar, which are 3D. In order to fulfill my vision for the game these 2D and 3D elements need to work together. This integration requires a deeper level of graphics programming (and math) than I have experience of, so my past week has been spent studying. That involves me reading books and documentation, and building prototypes to increase my knowledge of the area. That process is coming along really well, and I will be getting back to the 2D/3D integration soon.

This progress update is not a "flashy" one, it will be a while before I have new screenshots and video to show, but I really wanted to convey that I am deeply engaged in development of Universe or Nothing.


Thanks for reading!

- Mark

[Blaze]

I'm really happy to hear the good news about your wife. And that you're back to working on UoN seriously.

Thank you for the update, it's really interesting. If you want to delve deeper into the troubles you have with it, I'm all ears.

[Mark]

Up until now all my rendering for UoN has been handled automatically by the Xenko renderer, but those automatic systems (which take game objects in the world space and render them) do not allow for what I want (such as rendering a 3D spatial radar to the screen, without having to build it from game objects in the world space first). To render directly I have to "tell" the rendering engine what I want to render by sending it vertices, uv coords, a shader, and texture information.

The main problem is that the vertices that are sent to the renderer have to be relative to the camera, where a vertex (0,0,1) is one unit (metre) in front of the camera, but the vertices are stored either relative their parent. The parent can be the world space, but it could be another set of vertices, which themselves could be stored relative to another set of vertices (this is the case for spaceships, where some parts of the model are stored relative to other parts).

So in order to send these vertices to the renderer they need to be transformed from their current space (where they are relative to the world space or another set of vertices) to the camera space (where they are relative to the camera). The most efficient method of doing these transforms is using transformation matrices.

While I'm in study mode I am also studying some other computer graphics related maths, including Quaternions for storing and manipulating rotations. I've worked with Quaternions before, but without a complete understanding of them.

I'm making good progress with the study, and I have started building prototypes to put the theory into practice.

Thanks man.

[Grey]

Great to hear that the illness is over and both your lives are back to normal. That is the most important news.
But it is also great to know you are working again, because I can't wait to see more of UoN.

Good luck with the learning