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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsMy graphics journey with the N64
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Author Topic: My graphics journey with the N64  (Read 22004 times)
Kyle O
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« Reply #20 on: March 16, 2015, 09:50:46 AM »

This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. Posting to follow this ridiculousness.
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« Reply #21 on: March 16, 2015, 11:29:58 AM »

This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. Posting to follow this ridiculousness.

Tongue
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« Reply #22 on: March 16, 2015, 11:38:04 AM »

Had some time today so I re-wrote the RDP triangle renderer again. I think this time it's a bit cleaner. Here's the latest boring visuals. Smiley



Also here's the new code in diff form https://github.com/calebhc/libdragon/commit/20fd1e931fb9b02efc952a7d4ffac650f06c7e2a

I'm trying to talk to the author of libdragon now and get his thoughts on this new method. Would be cool to get this code eventually accepted into the lib and then start on implementing more triangle rendering methods! Someday I'll get to actually writing some kind of game thing for the console. :D

Btw I'll be able to test all of this on REAL HARDWARE soon! I'm waiting for this thing in the mail to show up.


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gimymblert
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« Reply #23 on: March 16, 2015, 11:54:28 AM »

droooool
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deadcast
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« Reply #24 on: March 19, 2015, 09:40:51 PM »

Nothing new to show yet but I found this awesome n64 demo built by http://retroactive.be/. The terrain engine he built is really cool. : )





Later
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Overman
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« Reply #25 on: March 19, 2015, 09:42:52 PM »



Hello. My name is deadcast64 and I'm working on building a 3d engine for a future, no release date game. I probably won't succeed in this project but you gotta live for something. Right now I'm trying to get a triangle to render but I really suck at the C language. ;-; So far I can draw a line. :>>>>> I'm building my engine on top of the https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon library which basically lets me plot pixels, draw lines, handle controls and play audio. Very light weight and has no dependencies on any proprietary libs. :D

Here are my machine specs if you have the interest:

NEC VR4300 64-bit
Reality Coprocessor
4 MB RDRAM

Thank you for reading.

Cool dude good luck looks like you've got a great start with that line there. Wow computer specs!
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« Reply #26 on: March 20, 2015, 01:56:16 PM »



Exciting news! My 64 Drive just shipped!! So soon I'll be able to test out my n64 code on real hardware. Smiley Should be here in a few days. I'll make sure and post some photos of the device and it running on the n64.

Also did a little more work last night on my triangle renderer for the Reality Display Processor but it's kinda not there yet.



Sometimes the triangle just disappears which I believe is due to how I'm calculating if the triangle is a major left or major right tri. I think once I fix that things should be rendering nicely. Smiley I'll make a new scene with different triangle configurations just to make sure my data preparation is correct.

Thanks
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deadcast
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« Reply #27 on: March 25, 2015, 08:03:53 PM »



Hello! I got my 64 Drive today and decided to try out my code that renders tris and this is what it looked like:



Pretty damn terrible. : ( Not sure why it's so messed up but I must be sending the data wrong to the RDP. It looks fine in the MESS emulator but I'm sure that's being pretty forgiving. Need to look at the SGI RDP docs again to see what I'm doing wrong. Never thought trying to render a damn triangle would be so hard. I haven't even got to textured, shaded or z buffered tris yet! Oh well, I'm not in any hurry.
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gimymblert
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« Reply #28 on: March 26, 2015, 05:17:37 AM »

The triangle is always the hardest, it's a simple primitive, and with it you get all the graphics, so it's obvious it's hard!

Congratz however Smiley
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oahda
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« Reply #29 on: March 26, 2015, 05:30:01 AM »

This is the best thing.

And don't worry about the triangle disappearing sometimes. That just makes it look more like a real N64 game. Wink)
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Ishi
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« Reply #30 on: March 26, 2015, 05:38:42 AM »

That's awesome! Been keeping an eye on this for a while. Good luck!
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« Reply #31 on: March 26, 2015, 03:17:17 PM »

I'm pretty sure you're a crazy person.  But I'm really looking forward to this!  Keep it up!  Gentleman
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« Reply #32 on: March 28, 2015, 11:02:48 AM »

Thanks Gimym JIMBERT, Overman, Octopus Tophat, Ishi and Prinsessa for the support! :D Yeah I'm realizing this project is going to take a while. Once I can get the dang triangles to look correct then I can start on other aspects of the engine.





Last night I was able to get my triangle test scene to finally render correctly and not crash the n64. Smiley I spent so many hours studying the RDP command set docs and checking my triangle calculations. The biggest problem was getting Left Major triangles to actually display. It turned out that the Fill Color command was breaking the Left triangles but correctly filling the Right. Once I turned off Primitive Filling everything worked but now everything is brown. Sad



So I think that my RDP commands are correctly formatted. I just need to debug why filling a Left Major triangle blows everything up... I really want to get some colored tris but maybe the fill command doesn't work on non shaded triangles. I might have to resort to going on to the next step and implementing color shading. uhg. oh well.  Undecided

Here's the bizarre format the Reality Display Processor wants the triangle info. It just wants a couple of vertex points and inverse edge slopes. I guess the engineers designed it this way to keep the Edge Walker code simpler? lol



Btw, I got to learn a cool formula for figuring out the winding of a triangle. Smiley Like knowing if the triangle is clockwise or counter-clockwise. This is important since the n64 needs to know this in order correctly render the span lines in between the tri edges.


http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PolygonArea.html
« Last Edit: March 28, 2015, 11:09:22 AM by deadcast64 » Logged
Ouren
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« Reply #33 on: March 28, 2015, 11:07:29 AM »

AHHHH
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« Reply #34 on: March 28, 2015, 06:10:09 PM »

I always dream about making a game from absolute scratch. Starting from plotting pixels, and making a full 3d game. That would be a huge challenge, and lots of fun for me. And now I can see someone else's similar project. Do you have any idea what the game will actually be like? I'm really excited to see what it'll look like, and if it'll have that classic "N64" look to it, even though it's brand new. I grew up on N64, and I love seeing that fog that hides distant objects/jittery camera/low poly count/jittery polygons/blurry textures/pretty terrible skyboxes/2d trees/"cardboard" cities/super simple lighting/guns that look like pencils(goldeneye). Seriously... I fucking love N64 graphics. It brings back my childhood, and no modern games have pulled off that same "N64" feel. I feel like it could only be done on ACTUAL n64 hardware, which is exactly what you are doing. You're awesome, and I wish you the best of luck with this. Gentleman
Also, have you considered utilizing the n64 expansion pak?
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« Reply #35 on: March 29, 2015, 09:57:59 AM »

I always dream about making a game from absolute scratch. Starting from plotting pixels, and making a full 3d game. That would be a huge challenge, and lots of fun for me. And now I can see someone else's similar project. Do you have any idea what the game will actually be like? I'm really excited to see what it'll look like, and if it'll have that classic "N64" look to it, even though it's brand new. I grew up on N64, and I love seeing that fog that hides distant objects/jittery camera/low poly count/jittery polygons/blurry textures/pretty terrible skyboxes/2d trees/"cardboard" cities/super simple lighting/guns that look like pencils(goldeneye). Seriously... I fucking love N64 graphics. It brings back my childhood, and no modern games have pulled off that same "N64" feel. I feel like it could only be done on ACTUAL n64 hardware, which is exactly what you are doing. You're awesome, and I wish you the best of luck with this. Gentleman
Also, have you considered utilizing the n64 expansion pak?

Thanks so much! I've also for a long time wanted to build something from a much lower level. I know there's really no need to today to write your own engine but it's interesting to learn about all the systems that make up a game engine. I guess in the end it'll give me a greater understanding of how games work instead of everything being mysterious.

Lol I actually don't have any clue yet what game I'm going to build. Smiley It will probably be some sort of 3rd person game set in a world like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Seeing a world like that in a low-poly, low-res form would be awesome. It'll definitely have that old n64 look to it with the fog and the SUPER crappy stretched textures. The n64 only has 4K of texture cache. Shocked Yeah I agree that the n64 was a big part of my childhood and that "look" can only be pulled off on the real n64/sgi hardware.

Yeah I totally could do something with the expansion pak. Heck I might even rely on it since it gives the console an extra 4 megs of RDRAM for a grand total of 8. lol Also the rumble pak is really cool!
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« Reply #36 on: March 29, 2015, 10:22:38 AM »

Quick update! Last night I was able to get the Left/Right Major triangles to fill correctly! :D Instead of using the standard Fill command that the rectangle uses, I needed to turn the first blend mode on and then color the triangles using blend color. Not totally sure why that works but it looks good to me. lol

I made a test scene that animates the vertices of a triangle. I had the room really dark so you could see the colors better on the TV.



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« Reply #37 on: March 29, 2015, 01:19:04 PM »



Well I just made a pull request to the project I'm building my engine on and hopefully it will eventually be accepted. The pull request is to include support for rendering hardware non-shaded triangles. Next on my list is getting shading support and texturing but I think that might be a ways off. Now since I have filled triangles I can start to work more on the engine part. Smiley

Later
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« Reply #38 on: March 29, 2015, 02:43:59 PM »

I have no idea how you're doing any of this, but I love everything about it Grin
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gimymblert
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« Reply #39 on: March 29, 2015, 02:46:42 PM »

Well you need to test overlapping and intersecting triangles first Tongue
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