Blog of Josh "Renanse" Slack

Winding Down

2014-03-11T14:49:00.001-05:00

As I recently announced on the Ardor3D forums, I'm winding down the Ardor3D project after having been fairly silent there over the past year while working at Disney. It was an honor working on the engine and led to fantastic things such as working with NASA and RollsRoyce as well as the birth of the Goo Engine. It is something I am proud to have been part of and sad to let go of, but it is time to move on to other things.

Fractured Universe

2013-05-05T12:14:00.001-05:00

My good friend +David Bitkowski and I have been working on an +OUYA game in our "spare time" now since about August of last year. Stalled by false starts with artists, changes in architecture and Real Life™, the game is finally coming together to the point where we can envision an alpha release in our near future. There is still a ton of balancing to do and of course plenty of bugs to squash, but somewhere along the way "fun" somehow emerged in the game. :) You can follow us over on Facebook to see images of the ships and such.

Fractured Universe is a fast paced, arena style combat game for 2-4 players. You choose your avatar from a number of different ships, each with its own unique skills and characteristics. As we progress in development, you'll eventually be able to bring ability cards into battle, customizing your battle experience in a strategic way.

It uses the open-source Ardor3D and Ardor3D-android libraries.

Now you too can Goo4Dead

2012-11-06T20:13:00.002-06:00

As this election day shambles to a close, I thought it might be appropriate to give the world a small diversion! So in that spirit, here is a version of the Goo Engine powered demo Goo4Dead you can download and try for yourself.

Keeping things simple, I've made it a zip you can download, unzip, and run by double clicking a jar. Further below is the README though if you'd like to have a look before deciding to download.

Goo4Deadv1.0.zip

Enjoy!

README.txt

Goo4Dead v1.0 - Joshua "Renanse" Slack

What is it?

A 100% browser based Left4Dead map viewer! You are reading this doc and fiddling with jars, etc. instead of pointing to my web server only because I'd need permission and bandwidth to be passing around the 6GB of assets that is Left4Dead (I have neither.) So instead, this demo uses assets from your copy of the actual Left4Dead game by running a small jetty server locally.

Before you start:

Make sure you have Steam and Left4Dead installed locally. :) If you don't have a copy, I highly recommend picking one up. http://store.steampowered.com/app/500/
You must have Java 6.0 or greater installed. You can get it at www.java.com/getjava/
You must have a recent version of Chrome (22) or Firefox (16) installed. On most machines I've tried, Chrome will give you 2-3x better performance.
You should probably make sure your video card driver is up to date.
Technical jargon: Your machine/browser must support Typed Arrays, DataView, WebGL, Float textures, and probably a few other odds and ends. You'll need enough memory (1GB should be ok) to load wholes bsp at once (they are interpreted completely in JavaScript.)

Running the demo:

Double click the goo4dead.jar
On first run, the application will try to find your Steam directory (by looking in 1 or 2 "standard" locations.) If it can not find it, it will ask you to locate it. Browse to and select your "Steam" folder, then click the "Select" button to continue.
Click the "Start" button to start up the server. The button will change to "Restart" and text will display below telling you the demo server is up and running. By default, it will open a port on 8080, but if that port is not available it will ask for a different port to try.
Click the "Open Client" button to launch your browser to http://localhost:8080 (or the port you chose)
In your browser, you'll see a section where you can specify the map you want to load. I've entered a default tutorial map that I think *should* be on most users computers, but perhaps not. You can clear that text field and type "maps/" and it will show you a list of maps on your local install. Or, if you know part of the name of your map (eg. apartment) you can type that and it will filter.
Click the "Load" button once you've picked a map and sit back. Large levels may take a few minutes to load completely. The default tutorial map loads in about 20-30 seconds on an average machine, but ymmv.

Controls:

You are a camera floating around the world. You can walk through walls, etc.
You can move around the world with your keyboard: forward (W), backward (S) and strafing left (A) and right (D).
You can change the direction you are currently looking using your mouse. Click the left mouse button in the browser window and drag.
You can hit "K" to toggle on and off the Tone mapping shader (off by default.)
You can hit the Space bar to reset the camera to the initial start location on most maps.

Acknowledgements:

I built the browser/client side of demo using the fabulous Goo Engine (www.gooengine.com). I used Guava (code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/) and Jetty (jetty.codehaus.org) to build the asset server.

And of course, Left4Dead is copyright and property of those wonderful guys over at Valve. http://www.valvesoftware.com/

Known issues:

This is not a game! Sorry, but no zombies or blowing things up (yet?)
There's plenty of neat visual things I don't have in this release, including overlays, sprites, light cones, decals, color post-processing and valves histogram based hdr tone mapping. I believe these could all be done given enough time, but I have to eat and pay bills and such. :)
Sorry, WASD doesn't map nicely onto other keyboard types. In a real game I'd let you remap these.
Some surfaces occassionally get their texture coordinates messed up. On the default tutorial map you can see this most often in the window glass and chain link fence. I've not had time to debug.
Very large maps may crash the browser. Sometimes restarting the browser and trying again helps.

Goo4Dead Video Walkthrough

2012-10-31T16:23:00.001-05:00

And here at last is that video walkthrough of the goo4dead project I've been posting about. It's almost 8 minutes long, so I'll spare you any more text to read and just get right to it:

Lightmaps

2012-10-21T01:36:00.000-05:00

Work continues on the Goo Engine port of my Ardor3D Left4Dead map viewer. I just finished up getting HDR lightmaps in as well as working my way through several Javascript headaches. I am still not applying the vertex colors and cubemap samplers for the props, and as you can see below no tonemapping yet. Still, I'm pretty amazed that I can fit a full level from L4D into a web browser, particularly since I've done nothing yet to optimize assets for a browser experience.

I will get a quick video walkthrough together as soon as I can, but for now, here are a few snapshots. Enjoy!

HDR lightmaps!

Looking the other way...

Hardly dented!

Revisiting the Apartment Level

2012-10-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

After a long day of coding, getting stumped, muttering curses, discovering a stupid mistake, recoding (and repeating the cycle), I can now load and walk around a good deal of the first level of Left4Dead in WebGL. My next challenge is unzipping an embedded .pak client-side so I can pull some material settings out (which would fix a lot of the bad texturing below.) Then perhaps I can start adding in entities (memory is already an issue though.) I am at least getting a decent frame rate (>30fps) so far, but there's still a lot to add of course, so we'll see.

I spent so much time staring at this level when writing the original Ardor3D importer that it feels a bit like coming home again. :)

Goo4Dead - mdls loading

2012-10-09T15:10:00.003-05:00

Next pic shows off .mdl files loading with a capture of Francis in his bind position. This includes the ability to load and parse .vvd, .vtx and .vhv files as well. I haven't brought across .vmt loading yet, so he's sporting a default shader and the Ardor3D logo.

Hi Francis!

Goo4Dead

2012-10-05T16:45:00.000-05:00

A few years back I put together an Ardor3D reader for HalfLife/Left4Dead maps. It was a fun exercise and even turned into a few videos on YouTube (yeah, I'd wanted to continue making those, but didn't generate enough interest to keep going.)

Fast forward to 2011, Rikard and I began work on the GooEngine project, a WebGL graphics engine with roots in Ardor3D. Since that time, I've really wanted to port my L4D work to Goo. There are some folks doing similar work, but none that I feel went as far as my old Ardor3D project. So, as time permits I will be porting that code and posting the results.

Here's my first pic. I refactored my VPK reading code into a jetty-based asset server (which I'm thinking of throwing up on github for public poking if there is interest.) From there, I've been reworking my VTF loading code for use in Goo. As my first complete "Hello World!", I am showing a VTF textured quad in Goo (WebGL), pulling the VTF texture via XHR2 from my asset server which pulls directly from a vanilla install of L4D/L4D2.

I don't think it will be too long before I have geometry coming in. Most of the challenges so far have been in converting over to asynchronous loading and ditching some fixed function pipeline use. We'll see though... :)

"All around, people looking half dead"

2012-07-06T14:38:00.001-05:00

It is the sweltering summer in the city of Austin and it has been a long time since a blog update. Let's play a little catchup with a little Q&A:

Q: Why no blog posts for six months?
A: Well, aside from my usual battery of stress - work, open source, school classes, family, church, etc. - I was hard at work helping some friends in Sweden (Rikard Herlitz for example) put together a new WebGL product... a Java and GWT based engine that's showing a lot of promise for putting together games, visualizations, and lots more. The engine is called "Goo Engine". (You can see more on it over at gooengine.com.) We were keeping it fairly quiet since we did not have a lot of fun demos to show (and our best demos are still not public since they use customer assets :-/) so I didn't have much to talk about.

Q: Is Goo Engine a successor to Ardor3D?
A: No, not really. Obviously since Rikard and I are working on it, it builds off of our previous experience, but so far it is meant primarily as a vehicle for commercial products and not something that is being released itself (so no, not open source.)

Q: Will you be spending all of your time on this new product?
A: I will spend some time helping them move it forward, but now that we've mostly got it running smoothly, I've handed Sweden (international business deals are so complex!) any reins I was holding so I can move on to the next thing.

Q: Which is...?
A: I'm not sure yet. :-) Something involving 3D, maybe work on a game. I am open to suggestions! I could probably use some more contract work though. ;-)

Q: Any plans for Ardor3D?
A: I'm planning to move the code base to git and googlecode soon and then look to move us quickly to v1.0. I don't anticipate a lot of feature additions along the way though, aside from making the Jogl2.0 renderer official. So sorry if you had a feature request in - I'm personally ready to move on to a new code base instead, (Ardor3D v2?). I am hoping git will better facilitate feature additions and bug fixes to 1.0 from the community.

Q: What else has been going on?
A: Our son Alexander was born a few days after my last post and he's already moving around the house getting into trouble. Also, I finally finished the schooling I was taking on the side to finish up my bachelor's degree... that's right, I started it back in NYC in '98 or so at Columbia University, but 9/11 and a new baby prompted us to move out of the city. While I haven't needed it so far in life, it's nice to have.

I've also just got back from a two week break and feeling recharged and ready to get back into things. If I've missed your emails or posts... I'm trying to catch up now.

Holiday Greetings!

2011-12-24T14:07:00.002-06:00

So, obviously we've been running in silent mode a bit these past few months, which is more than a little frustrating to me since I enjoy sharing what I'm working on. That should change very soon as we launch a new addition to the Ardor Labs product line. This product will be focused entirely on the web and be run a little differently from Ardor3D, so it should complement rather than replace our existing technology and, I believe, foster innovation in both.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all! See you in 2012!

Best wishes,

-- Josh "Renanse" Slack

PS: On a personal note, we're still waiting for our baby boy to arrive. Any day now!

Sweden bound

2011-09-26T11:25:00.004-05:00

Looking forward to heading over to Sweden soon to see friends and work hard on the future direction of Ardor Labs. I'm pretty excited as it will be my first time in that country - a place that several of my ancestors called home. Also, I'm looking forward to being in a room with Rikard, some snacks and a white board. Way easier to focus and progress the work without all the distractions of energetic kids, other projects and 7 time zones in the way. :)

If you are in the Stockholm area and would like to break bread or just say hi, give me a shout.

What's Going On?

2011-08-24T12:01:00.002-05:00

It's been a real hot summer here in Texas, which means I've spent a lot of time indoors at the computer. Ok, who am I kidding, I would have been at the computer anyway. For those who are wondering what that means for Ardor3D, here's some updates.

First of all, I'm pretty excited that NASA scientists planning missions for the next generation Mars rover, and reading/using the science it produces, will have Ardor3D under the hood. Rikard and I are working on more terrain improvements for this effort that will make their way into Ardor3D in the next couple of months. The major focus is on terrain+shadow work.

After a lot of delay caused by family matters (crazy how passing ons and new babies put a lot in perspective - and on hold) for both Rikard and myself, a long overdue interview with the Caromble team is coming together. If you are not familiar with the project, I would describe it as Breakout meets Katamari. Do yourself a favor and go check out their site. (And as alluded to above, Rikard's family has added another beautiful baby girl. Send him your congrats!)

Continuing on the Ardor3D front, a commercial game studio that I can not yet name has been contributing a lot recently to Ardor3D by finding areas to improve in animation and general performance. I'm hoping they get out of "silent" mode in the near future so you all can offer your thanks. :) In the meantime, enjoy the tweaks added to trunk.

As a final thought on Ardor3D I'd like to briefly mention the work that Rikard and I have been doing in relation to a new branch... probably to become v2. The gist of the effort is that we've been noticing the trend in OpenGL towards some "unification", if I can call it that, of the most recent OpenGL and OpenGL ES specs. Our efforts are geared towards allowing us to take advantage of this trend. I plan to head out to Sweden next month so we can speed up efforts, and hope to have more to say soon. Sorry for the tease. :-/

The other project taking up a large portion of my time lately (and feeding my family) is the continuing development of the Facebook game, Dungeon Overlord. While not working on game features or troubleshooting yet another facebook or amazon pain, Ardor Labs has been building an Android app allowing you to manage your dungeons on the road. The app is nearly done, just waiting for some legal stuff to fall into place. I'm looking forward to its release.

News for April

2011-04-12T17:37:00.002-05:00

Looks like I need to do a little catchup again. Here's the latest tidbits:

Dungeon Overlord - I'll just start off here since this game has taken a lot of my time lately. The game has broken the 100k mark of people who have tried it out which is pretty good considering the very limited advertising done to date. Most of my time has been spent unraveling hibernate snarls and improving performance. I was a server programmer prior to my OpenGL days, and a lot has changed since then so it's been fun catching up. Recent new game additions include new creature abilities, Easter surprises and continuous performance improvements.

Ardor3D - Even though I've been busy with DO lately, Ardor3D has received lovin to a few different systems. Probably most interesting is the addition of VBO support for vertex attributes, greatly increasing our performance when doing things such as gpu skinning. See the updated AnimationDemoExample for a preview. I also have spent time with gDebugger looking for unnecessary gl calls and found one or two also related to shader use. Actually, we also overuse glColor, but before I can eliminate that I need to find all the places that can affect current color. :-/

In addition to shader improvements, we've added a new UI widget (UIComboBox) as well as the ability to render to cubemap textures (dynamic reflections!) Both of these, as usual, can be tested out in the examples. Seems we need to release a 0.8 soon.

In other news, Rikard and I are hoping to announce soon another little project we've been working hard on for the last several months. We're pretty excited about it and I hope you will be too. :)

Ardor3D and jinngine

2011-01-15T11:59:00.000-06:00

Ardor3D & jinngine

For a recent support task I was asked to help with integrating some kind of physics system and Ardor3D. After having played around in the source code of Rikard's ArdorCraft - Galaxies I really started liking the simplicity of the jinngine physics engine. While still a little rough around the edges, it's stable and simple to use. For the support task, I put together a little demo app, which you can see in the picture to the right. Try it out here (requires Java 1.6 and an OpenGL 1.2 capable graphics card.)

Dungeon Overlord

2011-01-11T11:59:00.000-06:00

Dungeon Overlord - launched Jan. 6!

The game I referred to in my last post is now out in the wild, ready to sate your evil dungeon keeper appetites. Titled "Dungeon Overlord", I would describe it as a mix of Dungeon Keeper / Evil Genius and PvP games such as Travian and Ikariam. DO's game designer would probably describe it much better, but that is his job after all. You can always go play it on facebook right now and correct my description!

Playing the game, you'll see that, alas, the game is flash based - easily detectable by the sound of your fans kicking on as flash hungrily sucks your cpu dry. While I would have loved to see DO done in Ardor3D, Night Owl is flash heavy and the game is not 3D anyhow. That said, I definitely have to give the client programmers props for squeezing a level of performance and capability out of flash I have rarely seen. Maybe I can convince them to do a 3D sequel... :P

Ardor Lab's (and thus my) role in this endeavor has been implementing much of the server side of the game and as such, it has been admittedly nerve-racking watching it go live. The game was tested well by Sony's (the publisher) QA staff, but the few thousand Facebook users that have started playing since the launch Thursday night have, of course, already uncovered new issues. I'm glad we are taking this slow (only word of mouth advertising), giving us some extra time to incorporate the feedback of these early dungeon overlords before the hordes descend.

A New Year Approaches

2010-12-31T11:30:00.001-06:00

Goodbye 2010, it seems like we just met... but 2011 is calling.

I've been pretty slow to post lately, mostly because I've been working hard on something that has been delayed more than once and have not felt like dangling it in front of everyone just yet. Truthfully, I've also felt like this blog has become more of an announcement vehicle for Ardor3D topics and so if something doesn't feel "announce-worthy" I hesitate to post. So for 2011, I'm going to take a page from other blogs I read and post regularly, even if I don't have an "OMG look at this!" bit of news. :) Feel free to adjust your subscriptions accordingly.

2011 will finally mark the launch of a game I've been working via Ardor Labs for the local game studio Night Owl Games. If you visit their site, you'll see a crazy old trailer for the game. Even back then it looked like a very fun game, but the art and game play have since improved tremendously. I'll say more once we launch - hopefully in a week or two.

Ardor3D 0.7 was finally released a bit ago. It's a mark of just how busy I've been (the aforementioned game, and a conference in Taiwan mostly) that I took this long to plug it. :-/ In the time since, we've also added a few fun items such as a texture atlas creater, a port of nvidia's NvTriStrip library (as an Ardor3D Visitor class), and we fixed up our geometry tool to work on SkinnedMesh items. Taken together with our MeshCombiner, you now have several options for optimizing static and skinned meshes in Ardor3D.

Finally, I have been playing a bit of League of Legends with my brothers (and sometimes my wife as well). If you play too and haven't checked out some of the recent YouTube parody videos, do yourself a favor and go see them now. :)

End of summer - a little time to relax

2010-09-30T17:13:00.000-05:00

Wow, last day of September already! Time has flown by and things are going well here. Finished up one of my ongoing college courses, wrapped up a few work projects, finished up judging the Ardor3D Summer Event entries, got some new features up in Ardor3D and now taking a day or two off to decompress. Wheew!

(Aside: Did I ever mention how much I have always loved giving myself extra pressure? Extra AP courses in highschool, studying three different languages - none of which I speak fluently anymore - full time work and school at same time, extra roles/duties at church, kid's schools, open source communities, etc. What's that? Do I want more to do? Heck, why not!)

Ardor3D's Mobile Summer Event was a success for us at Ardor Labs, with three folks getting sponsorships. We had one participant (community member 'methius') finish his entry in time to receive his full sponsorship prize of $1,500 and it looks fantastic. You can see his final entry over at the Ardor3D forums. Also, read an interview with him done by one of our most active community members, 'paranoidray', posted on the Ardor3D news site.

Speaking of Ardor3D, recently added is the new UI widgets UITextField, UIPasswordField and UITextArea. Also included is a new text system that enables markup and styles. There's still several things to do on these for polishing, but I think it is a good first step. There's more about this on the wiki and forums. The new text widgets were sponsored mostly by a game company that prefers to run in silent mode currently, but I hope to be able to say nice things about them in the near future. :)

Also on the subject of sponsored items, coming soon in svn is the rewrite and revamp of Ardor3D's terrain system - work that was pushed forward at the request of teams at NASA Ames and JPL. Included in that rewrite is streaming clipmapped geometry and texture data, blended texture layers and several other niceties.

As a final note, I wanted to mention that we have been experimenting on an Eclipse based project we hope will prove useful to Ardor3D users as a whole. As part of that, expect to see our jars become more OSGi friendly in the near future. Enjoy!

Picture of the Day

2010-08-03T17:26:00.001-05:00

Recently added skin mesh cloning to ardor and threw it quickly into one of our examples to test out. The cloning is up in svn, the example changes are not, but enjoy this picture. :)

JAI, JPEG2000 and Eclipse/RCP

2010-07-23T17:06:00.004-05:00

So during my work here at NASA JPL these last two weeks, I've been integrating Ardor3D, streaming clipmap-based terrain and a Wii controller into an Eclipse RCP application for viewing on a 3/4 round CAVE projection screen. Things have gone very smoothly, with the exception of one head-scratcher that stopped us in our tracks when moving from a standard Ardor canvas to the RCP application.

We stream in terrain information as loss-less jpeg2000 images (to save bandwidth) and use JAI to decode. Our problem emerged as soon as we moved from a standalone native canvas to RCP and our terrain stopped loading. For about three hours we debugged the network, the shaders, the rcp code and dug deep into the bowels of JAI before realizing that for some reason JAI stopped being able to decode jpeg2000 images.

After a lot of debugging, the manager of the group here (one Mark Powell, not the jME guy,) recalled an issue with JAI where there were assumptions in JAI about classloaders and static initializers and these assumptions were false in RCP. The fix was to manually force initialization of the jpeg2000 reader service with a small static block of code like so:

{
J2KImageReaderSpi spi = new J2KImageReaderSpi();
IIORegistry.getDefaultInstance().registerServiceProvider(spi);
}

And just like that, 3 hours of head scratching was fixed with 2 lines of code. I post this in the hopes that it saves someone else those same hours.

In other news, I was fortunate enough to be at JPL this week for the first "test drive" of the new mars rover "Curiosity". Several dozen folks who had obviously invested many hours of blood, sweat and tears into the project crowded a narrow observation deck to gaze down at the clean room floor below. Curiosity is a good deal larger than the MER rovers (Opportunity and Spirit) we've come to be familiar with over the last decade. It also has a lot more science equipment on board such as a laser that shoots out of one of its cameras, blasting away the top layer of a rock to see into the raw material beneath.

Curiosity was hooked to a large umbilical cord and men and women in white clean room suits stood around it waiting for something to happen. About 20-25 minutes crept by in the rapidly warming observation deck when suddenly, the rover lurched forward at a slow crawl and drove for perhaps 2 meters before halting at the edge of the mat it stood on.

Ok, not exactly Hollywood, but the crowd on the platform broke out into applause with smiles all around. Good times.

More android tweaks, jpl

2010-07-10T16:21:00.000-05:00

Quick update... Ardor3D's Android binding has been improved to avoid unnecessarily scaling bitmap resources, reducing some extra memory usage and startup/load times. Specifically, we are using BitmapFactory.Options to disable automatic scaling during bitmap loading, and allowing you to optionally pass your own options to the bitmap loader. More Android items should come over the next few weeks as we work with the summer event finalists on their projects.

In other news, I may be a little slow returning emails later this month as I will be visiting the NASA JPL labs to help them with an Ardor3D project involving CAVE systems. Please use the forums to solicit help from Rikard (mrcoder) and our awesome community as always.

Froyo Update

2010-07-03T10:29:00.000-05:00

Latest alpha ardor3d-android is up now with fixes related to froyo. It appears that (at least on Nexus One handsets) that trying to use user clip planes (even just the 1 it claims to support) will throw an enum exception... so that functionality is disabled for now.

Grab it here. Box example (apk) here.

Back from Space

2010-07-02T11:53:00.002-05:00

The last week or two has been pretty crazy, first getting the Android sdk out to the public and then helping push out massive terrain improvements (kudos goes to Rikard for the biggest share of that) and integrate them for a NASA project. My apologies to those waiting for fixes, feedback, or such from me... I am back for a week or two and will be hitting as many requests as I can before the next storm hits.

On the plus side, there has been a lot of interesting developments in Ardor3D land. The NASA stuff is of course part of that, and I hope to get some media to show off there in the near future. In addition to that though, we've had some nice work already on display from one of the three Mobile Summer event finalists, methius, with his project Xplorers. I am looking forward to seeing more of that project.

Speaking of Android, we've had recent reports that there are issues using the ardor3d android sdk under froyo (specifically complaints of an invalid gl enum.) I'll be updating my N1 tonight and should have a fix out this weekend, so watch for that if you are experiencing similar problems.

Mobil Summer Congrats!

2010-06-22T20:55:00.001-05:00

Congratulations to the three finalists in the Ardor3D Mobile Summer Event! They are:

While these folks may be excited to get paid to work on their idea, I'm personally just happy to have 3 teams helping us push our new android binding towards a stable, usable release. :)

Come join us on the forums and cheer them on, or if you are brave, start your own project with the alpha release of our android binding.

See you there!

Ardor3D Mobile Summer Rules Up

2010-06-04T22:47:00.001-05:00

The rules are up and the forum is ready for entries! Looking forward to seeing your creations listed there.

Junior Java Programmer Wanted

2010-05-31T11:09:00.001-05:00

Ardor Labs is looking for a Java programmer to help us keep up with our workload. The position would be here in Austin, Texas and involves Java Servlets, Hibernate, Hudson, MySQL and probably some Ardor3D coding as well. We're looking for a "junior" person due to budget, but could arrange a part time contract position for someone more senior. Check out our Craig's List posting for more details. If you are interested, or know someone good, send your info and resume to jobs@ardorlabs.com. (Mention this blog in your email!)