Horde3D

So I have made a few posts about bugs relating to this project, but now I will post about the project itself.

Over the past Academic Quarter, a team of artists and I have been working on a project that uses this rendering engine called "Tribal Aeronauts". The basic story is this. In an alternate future, persistent wars on the ground cause groups of people to flee in airships to the skies. As the countries wars tore life on the ground to shreds, the people in the sky lived in peace until on the ground there was nothing left. The ground was left an uninhabitable wasteland. These new societies organized themselves into tribes. When these tribes met, mostly there would be peace. But other times there would be war.

This idea had been one that I had in my mind since I was 16 and making maps for Halo Custom Edition, and now am finally getting the chance to see materialize. I was just waiting for the time to be right to make it happen. I owe alot to the team I am working with. They really are a talented group of individuals.

Right now, I only have a build that works on Windows, unfortunately, but the engine I am developing for this will be runnable on both major operating systems, (Windows and Linux). The major technologies involved are:

Horde3D - Of course
Bullet Physics - Naturally
OpenVG - The ShivaVG implementation.
FMod - OpenAL was causing me nothing but problems.
PhysicsFS - A virtual filesystem solution I plan on replacing in the future.
Angelscript - An awesome scripting language implemented in C++

With their powers combined, they are the Ir Engine. A fully scriptable game engine built on the same principles as the Unreal Engine.

Here is a link to the project page, that also includes an embedded gameplay video and a link to download the game as it currently stands: http://mlr315.aisites.com/showcase/aeronauts.html

I just wanted to update saying that I have a blog for this project up.
You can find it here:
http://angryprogrammingprimate.blogspot.com/

very cool demo. : D. only very slow flying aircraft

The biggest problem I am having is that in order to move faster, I need a much larger area to work with. I am tempted to scale the aircraft models down, but they are scaled pretty small as it is. My other restriction is that if I go too small, bullet may have some issues. In addition, scaling the map up causes issues with the renderer where... damn, don't even know how to describe the issue. It looks like smaller models are shivering.

Nice game idea MikeR! It reminds me of this game I've got on steam called DogFighter.

Smaller objects shivering due to the scaled up world, hmm.... This might be something to do with zbuffer precision issues, try tweaking the near/far clip plane for the camera. Eg this is default afaik (with _camera being the H3DNode of your default rendering camera):

h3dSetNodeParamF( _camera, H3DCamera::NearPlaneF, 0, 0.1 );
h3dSetNodeParamF( _camera, H3DCamera::FarPlaneF, 0, 1000 );

Hopefully this helps, maybe with a fog shader so that the world geometry bounds don't have an obvious cut-off. I'm surprised though that you're seeing z-fighting, I wonder if the engine is using a 16-bit zbuffer or something small, if it is this issue anyway...

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-Alex
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