I tried evolving new kinds of movement in 3D humanoid characters. There has been a lot of research on dynamic humanoid walking controllers, but what about crawling? Or breakdancing?

Link to youtube video…

I have been working on ways to improve the intersections between different objects. The examples shown here demonstrate automatic ambient occlusion and weathering effects as well as one kind of geometry deformation.

I extended the physics engine to support ligament and muscle constraints, and then attached them to a skeleton model to demonstrate how the shoulder joint works.

Link to youtube video.

There are two excellent single-player campaigns for Lugaru made by forum users Silb and Jendraz. They are both longer and more in-depth than the original Lugaru campaign, and use a lot of engine features in innovative ways that I hadn’t thought of. Click on these links to try the Empire and Temple campaigns!

The point-stick-triangle physics described in the previous post is very good for quickly defining articulated bodies, but it is not appropriate for simulating large numbers of colliding rigid bodies. I am experimenting with different methods to handle these cases: here is a screenshot of a standard box collision test using ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) integration. We can use our old system for special physics like characters and plants, and ODE for large numbers of simpler objects.

Here is a link to a video of the new physics in action. 

I managed to combine my Wolfire work with Swarthmore class work by improving my physics engine and creating a small web page about how it works. You can find it here if you are interested; it has screenshots and videos of it in action.

I was tired of my old sky dome, so I replaced it with a single quad with a pixel shader that handles shifting backlit and normal-mapped clouds, ‘god’ rays, and atmospheric scattering. It actually has a lower impact on framerate than the old sky because it is all drawn at the same time.

I started to revisit the terrain surface shading today, and implemented parallax mapping to give a greater feeling of depth to the ground.

Henry just got initial multiplayer support working; we can now connect and chat and jump around! There is no fighting yet, but this is a great first step.

Dynamic terrain level of detail is working now using a form of patch-based geomipmapping; this means that we can seamlessly render distant terrain at lower level of detail, so polygon count does not increase exponentially as view distance increases. This means that we can make the far clip plane much farther away while maintaining high framerate, so you will be able to see far into the distance.