Life and Code

The last two weeks off work have been a very creative time for me. I have been playing around with a few tools that I can see making garage/one man game development easier. Before last week, I was very much into Irrlicht and Newton, but this all has changed. My toolbelt has been helped out quite a bit by changing perspectives. My new tools of choice jME (the jMonkey Engine), jME physics, Blender and MakeHuman.

JMonkey and JME physicis are pretty cool tools, for Java. The game/graphics engine is very well featured and the physics engine seems to be the same. They use jinput and LWJGL and provide very simple and useable starting points for creating games. I very much like both of these projects. C++ will always be the king of speed but Java doesn’t do that badly anymore.

Since I have been weaned from the high cost 3DSMAX and Poser, I have been using Blender. Blender has served me very well, it is an excellent tool. It provides functionality that you would otherwise have to pay high prices for. The place I have lacked here is in my ability to create good looking humanoids. Enter MakeHuman, this tool may not be as deep as Poser is but I really like the models it produces. The project seems to be heading towards a good place and I like it alot.

These tools are ecellent, and I have played with them quite a bit in the last two weeks. I am looking forward to finishing my demo now. 

Code 3d, engine, human characters, java, modelling

This weekend, was one of celebration for many reasons. Independence/freedom was definitely the bigger of the two ideas worthy of celebration. But my small win was finally integrating the Newton dynamics library with the Irrlicht 3D engine.

The libraries do integrate pretty well, the only issues I had were with some of the subtleties. In general, it is simply a matter of figuring out how to translate between Newton and Irrlicht’s matrices. This is actually accomplished very easily with a memory copy. I fought improper placement of the x, y, z values but once I figured out where they should be, the libraries made the problems minimal.

Code engine, integration, Irrlicht, Newton