Horde3D

Heya

My name is Steven Campbell and I'm one of the programmers of "Team Caffeine"
We have gotten into the Dare to be Digital competition hosted by the University of Abertay-Dundee in Scotland

I'm the main engine programmer, and for our graphics, I decided on using Horde3D because of it's very clean interface, it's small and easy to figure out what's going on, and it's OpenGL based! We did test out Ogre3D as well as both myself and the other programmer in the team have experience with Ogre, but it's a bit too big for what we need.. and if something went wrong in Ogre, we'd be lost in trying to fix it - especially since Dare only gives us ten weeks to make a game!

So, I'd like to send a thanks to all the developers involved in Horde3D
Here's hoping we can make a game that'll really show off it's power!

We'll let you know how everything goes...
... and we'll be sure to shout if we need a hand

-- Steven "Stuckie" Campbell

Good luck with your project.

I hope we get to see some screen-shots in a few months time

Thanks

There's just a week to go before the whole thing starts, and I'm looking forward to it!
We managed to sort out getting models and level data being loaded via Collada in minutes.. it was proving to be a bit of a headache in Ogre... but that was possibly just down to a bad plugin more than anything else, or odd export settings ( we did have to re-export our assets with baked matrices for Horde to get them right )

I'm going to have a quick look over the current SVN code over the weekend to see if there's any fancy bits we can use from that, but it's possibly best we stick with the current 1.0 beta, as I've had no problems while messing with that so far.

Only fun bit that I can see happening is getting ODE to play nice with Horde, but I don't think that'll be much of a problem.. though comments and suggestions are much appreciated for how to go about doing so

Never looked at ODE but there is a simple example of how Bullet could be attached to Horde.

BTW. For those waiting for it, I recently updated the Bullet Demo to work with Horde 1.0Beta

right it should be easy to implement ODE, and we havee the bullet integration (who needs ODE when he has bullet ) I remember trying to add ODE to my bsp based engine... sigh...
btw may 2008 -> havok will be released

I hadn't actually heard of Bullet until recently, and our other programmer has only heard of it in passing.

We're going to stick with ODE for the simple fact that we both know what we're doing with that.. it's just a case of wrapping it into my engine, around both Horde and Lua.

I do thank you for the Bullet example though, as that'll come in handy to rip apart for when we get ODE running

I'm using ODE with Horde3D and it work well in general. The only little problem I had is about euler angle with Horde3D and ODE. The returned angle is not the same.

And good luck with your project!

That wouldn't by any chance be because one uses radians and the other uses degrees?

_________________
Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

I'm already converting horde degrees into radians for ODE. When I set a rotation of 90 degrees in ODE, horde3D is returning -90 but I did not go any further on this problem.

I guess that is the euler angle's singularities: pitch +90 and pitch -90, north and south poles. Need to handle them separately.

Well, we're a week in and we've managed to get a few things working

I've scripted most of Horde so that we can manipulate it through our Lua interface.
Our other programmer has implemented ODE and we have Horde and ODE behaving themselves somewhat.
We've got our artists exporting to COLLADA via Maya and a scale system setup.
And I'm about to add control pad support so we can get the meshes to run around with the Playstation 2 pads, and mess with the COLLADA convertor somewhat so that the artists can manipulate the physical properties of the models and stuff.

Our Dare blog is here: http://www.daretobedigital.co.uk/team-i ... idTeam=277 should you want more information about the game, and see how we're getting on and stuff, as well as what the other teams are doing.

So far we haven't had any problems, but we're still early on... we're after a first playable within another week, so will report back then and give some binary goodness out for people to play with

Can you share your Horde3D Lua wrapper?

Thanks

You can find one in the editor too, just check the LuaBindingsHorde.h and LuaBindingsHorde.cpp

Ours isn't quite finished and is somewhat engine specific in places... It's basically just Proxy methods using the Lunar template from Lua's user wiki..

Never looked at the Lua bindings in the editor, to be honest.. I just went my own way, so the one from the editor is probably much cleaner and of more use to you

[edit]
been warned that due to it being developed during Dare, I'm not really able to release it till afterwards... though as I just said, it's nothing but Proxy methods generated with the Lunar template setup

Just thought I'd throw up some screenshots of what we're upto, since there are none in this thread so far! ( was sure I had put some up too.. oh well )


This is the first level.. "Toothy" the Tunnel This is a bit of an older screenshot ( there's a LOT more going on in there now, with our Weedunks jumping about all over the place like crazy ), but it shows off our artists work on the textures and models


The first section of our Factory level It's not finished yet, but thought it looked pretty enough to take a screenshot of anyway, hehe.. I upped the resolution to 1024x768 specifically for this one, as I thought it looked particularly nice.

Hope you like! The lighting still needs tweaked a lot ( our second level looks very cartoony compared to the first, for instance ) but as I've Lua-fied pretty much the entire engine, it's not hard to do.
We've just a few weeks left to finish the game, and we're certainly on our way to getting there... we'll hopefully have a new video up on our diary page soon as well.