Game Over!

I’m sorry that I have to tell you that the Minigolf3D project has to be suspended due to another major HDD crash. Besides the loss of the Minigolf3D source code and all my private data the most annoying fact is that all my Irrlicht related work is gone, too. This involves all physics and network code that I made.

To cut a long story short, there definately won’t be any other Minigolf3D game by the Masterhawk studios, but there will be other projects which are not yet specified. Minigolf3D gave me a great insight in the structure of a game-project which I can apply on any other future project.

This development-blog will be closed down within this year. All information about new projects and stuff like that will published on the Masterhawk-studios Blog

I also want to send out a big thanks to deesine for his stunning work on the menu-design for Minigolf3D.

So long, the Masterhawk studios never die!

Time eating top-secret project

It’s time again to update you about the current development progress of the project.

(Un-)fortunately, I’m currently writing my bachelor thesis so I only have a minimum of time to keep up the development on Minigolf3D. In the next 2-3 month I only can work on the project in my rare spare time. I know that a lot of projects like this one get abandoned exactly at this point when spare time gets rare, but I can tell you I’m really confident that my free-time will be back soon

The waiting can be worth your while if you are developing something in the game, rendering or modelling section. There will come up a very useful tool for you. More information when the time is ripe on the Masterhawk studios blog. For now it’s classified “TOP SECRET”

CustomUI 0.6 released

Some minutes ago I uploaded the newest version of CustomUI onto the server. You’ll find the whole article and all other news on CustomUI and other Masterhawk studios projects except Minigolf3D at the the new website/blog.

Masterhawk studios website

Just another update

I guess it’s time for another brief update on the development progress.

Currently the improvements to CustomUI need most of the available time. It receives a few major bugfixes and addition by now and it’s straight heading to version 0.6. Due to the lack of time I won’t provide a useful documentation for you as developer in the upcoming version, either. I’m sorry about that and I will try to provide a detailed sample code with the version 0.6 package.

Another topic I currently deal with is the “serverpark” of the Masterhawk studios. I’ll try to get it usable for public access as soon as possible, because this implies the launch of the new Masterhawk studios homepage. Since the old one became too hard to manage, due to its simple html-only source, it’s a good possibility to perform this step now.

CustomUI 0.5 released

Today is a memorable day. I finally managed to release a roughly cleaned source of the CustomUI.

Due to the fact that Minigolf3D should not be released with the standard Irrlicht GUI as frontend I decided to write my own GUI class which is set on top of the Irrlicht GUI. With this step I could achieve an easily and fully customizable GUI which uses the Irrlicht GUI as underlying concept and consequently is easily addable to nearly every Irrlicht project. The Irrlicht GUI elements can be used alongside.

At the current release CustomUI supports a handful of GUI elements:

• CEImage
• CEEditBox
• CEButton
• CEComboBox
• CEMessageBox
• CEListBox
• CEProgressBar
• CEAnimatedImage

Of course, since CustomUI is still under development there are a handful of bugs. So if you find something you think I don’t know it, please send me a detailed description or use the comment function.

By the way, I promised to give you a sneak peek of the upcoming Minigolf3D menu style. Keep in mind that it’s still under development, so the buttons will maybe get a caption

Download (CustomUI[0.5] source)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Unfortunatly I missed to finished, polish and publish the CustomUI sourcecode for you. Even the promised shots of the new menudesign couldn’t be provided due to major leak of time.

So here’s the wisdom of the day:

Never believe in an IT release-date ( ep1stle, 2008 )

But heads up…it’s christmas! You wouldn’t have any time to work with these things anyway because you spend your time with your families instead of working with the PC. Don’t even think about it!

So Masterhawk studios wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Because I guess you won’t hear from me before the next year.

New menu design assuming shape

In a post on April, 15th I wrote that the development on the new menu design started. Well, it really did but it progressed very slowly due to writing concepts and spending time on other major things.

But now the dev is accelerating again. One month ago I received the first drafts of the new menu design by deesine and have to say they look gorgeous. The new menu concept forced me to create my own “Irrlicht-GUI-Extension”. The idea was to be able to completely change the look of the GUI but also be able to further on use native elements of irrlicht. Due to this fact it’s very simple to extend your IrrlichtApp with the CustomUI and make it more beautiful. Anything you can create in Photoshop or whatever can be used to make your GUI unique.

Once I brought the code to an acceptable stage I will make it open-source and available for download. Detailed information about the features will follow. Of course I will publish of the new design here. So stay tuned!

And the winner is….Compound Collision!

In the last few days I dug into the Newton physics-engine a bit deeper because the NewtonCovexHull didn’t suit my needs for concave meshes.
The NewtonTreeCollision works great on static meshes and creates perfect collision on those. But since it’s not possible to create a exact – face by face – collision for dynamic meshes in a way to keep up the performance, I had to alter a different solution for dynamic meshes than NewtonTreeCollision. In order to get the best approximation for concave meshes I finally decided to use CompoundCollsion (well, I guess I really hadn’t many alternativesalternativen).

This CompoundCollision has to consist of an arbitrary count of convex collisions but can result in a huge concave one. Due to the fact that Irrlicht loads MY3D-files in a way that each part (e.g. box, plane or sphere) the format differs is stored its own meshbuffer. So if the map creator just takes care that all used parts are convex he will get a perfect collision. Otherwise if one or two parts are concave it won’t affect the whole CompoundCollision.

Map designers will get a more detailed introduction in what is possible and what might be the restrictions of that solution when the time has come.

New blog design

As you already noticed I set up a new design for this blog. The old one definitly had a too unclear font. Sure the new one needs some more time to set it up right but I hope that you like the new design. So I get back to work on the concave mesh. It’s not solved yet but I’m on a good way.

Physics and its hurdles

First of all I want to pay tribute to “Julio Jerez”, the man behind the scene, for it’s upcoming Newton 2.0. As a developer I have access to the unofficial BETA versions of the newest Newton release. And I really have to say that the improvements and new features are very promising. One of the most promising new features is the native multi-processor support which allows the developer to optimize his application for multi-core processors in a much more advanced way. If you want to get further information on this topic you should have a look at this thread in the newton forums.

Irrespective of these positive aspects another major problem occurred in the development of the game. One of the new features of Minigolf3D lets the user set up his map with an arbitrary shaped physics object. As the word “arbitrary” suggest also concave shaped meshes should be allowed like the hut on the image.

The created collision (represented by the lines) do not fit the shape of the real model. Newton does only have a native support for creation of a convex hull of an arbitrary mesh. So I work on solution under high pressure in order to get this working right.

Let’s go to spend some time on concave hulls!