New features of NxOgre! (April Fools!)

Hello all!


Some good news. I've been very very busy trying to work on NxOgre as much as possible without my working PC, fortunatly
my sister had agreed a few weeks ago I could pick up the development on her computer.


Loki


Loki is a virtual-processor library for NxOgre I created, it basically re-maps all opcodes and memory to simulate a processor, it's
not an emulator though so there is very little slow down. It is pretty similar to how VirtualPC works on the Mac.

Currently it works under OS X with some of the basic features (shapes, bodies, joints, etc.) of NxOgre, and with a little pushing it works under Linux.



Weather effects

It can now snow and rain in the scene now. Obviously it uses billboards and particle effects for the graphics side, but it uses
ray casting for the rain and small falling bodies to simulate the snow.

When rain builds up on a particular face, assuming the body is a meshShape (currently it doesn't work with any other shape and I can't
see how it can), it will change the material of that particular face so it's more slippery.

Snow is an interesting feature as it will gather up, it will automatically alter and create new vertices on the meshShape for the snow
to build up on it, currently I'm working on a way using the Decal code that is floating around to so it'll adjust the UVW map and the
image so the snow will appear on the ground.


Intelligent breakable objects, making them brittle or they can shatter

Another fantastic thing I'm working on, currently in alpha. Say if a very brittle cubic piece of glass was being pushed along the
ground, with this prefab the body will break apart on certain stress points then generate smaller bodies for the broken off pieces.

As it's basically how a fake soft-body works, it's pretty easy to generate stress points of the body.

Temperature

Temperature is a little other thing I did, it's more suited to the states system. But each body has it's own temperature and a scene and a stage (Well will do) does too and it pretty much follows the laws of thermodynamics quite well too!


Okay, that's the new stuff. Sadly not many screenshots for today, but everything is either in Alpha or hold on by string, also the computer is in a room I can't get in at the moment.

Anyway, as always enjoy!

Sounds incredible.

Finally an answer!

I thought I was going mad here.

Sounds great!!!!

Is this stuff available via CVS or is it all still in the works?

Crypto

Ooooooh.....

April Fools!!





But seriously, Loki is pretty much impossible for me.

However things like temperature sounds pretty good, as if I get a firm understanding of thermodynamics, I could implement it.

Weather effects such as rain could be possible, if I could adjust the mesh material faces dynamically.

Build up of snow, not really possible because PhysX won't allow you to adjust a mesh vertices and faces after it's been created.

Oh well, I fooled two people.

Tut tut, you got those 2 poor people all excited for nothing!

I couldn't resist

Sorry i know this isnt the place but while ive got your attention

I was looking to startintegrating PhysX into ogre, looks like this saves me alot of work. Are you planning on implementing their upcoming fluid dynamics? (the examples are on the site but are they in the 2.4.0 license version not public?)
Im just sat here for Ageia to verify my registration so im looking around the site. Only 3 or 4 of the tutorials work?

That's it! I'm switching over to Newton! haha

Sorry i know this isnt the place but while ive got your attention

I was looking to startintegrating PhysX into ogre, looks like this saves me alot of work. Are you planning on implementing their upcoming fluid dynamics? (the examples are on the site but are they in the 2.4.0 license version not public?)
Im just sat here for Ageia to verify my registration so im looking around the site. Only 3 or 4 of the tutorials work?

As for fluids, as far as I know it's PPU card only as I don't have one I can't really test out if the code works or not. So the answer is unfortunately no, but I'm happy to accept any code that does work with it or if anyone wants to buy me one, I'll be happy to write the code

And where did you get that number? It's around 20 odd.

That's it! I'm switching over to Newton! haha

To late, April fools was yesterday!

Haha, nice one betajaen. I started reading, and thought "Well, that's a huge jump..." so I wasn't too surprised when you quipped "APRIL FOOLS!". Okay, so you got me a little...

So what other things have you planned for the next release? Some soft body prefabs are a must I think. Fragementing shapes... There's another. As far as fluid simulation, your correct about it being PPU only- no way real-time fluid dynamics can be simulated without one. At least as far as the PhysX SDK goes... Waaaay too much going on there. I bet if we were all uber-genius maniacal programmers there would be way to hack/work around some low quality 'fake' fluids using something like deformable meshes... But I think some other 3rd party solution exists for something not so dynamic as the fluids you see in the 2.4 previews, but would be cool none the less.

Anyways... Back to new features! Whatcha got?! I remember you had said something about implementing something to make cloth easier to work with, that would be cool for sure. The weather effects you talked about would be awesome, even minus the snow buildup, etc. Though these would be basically particle systems at heart correct? Maybe to seperate them from the 'particle pack' you could do something with the weather system to make it a bit more unique... Something like slowdown/speedup or rather intensity of rain over time (like mRainIntensity(0.7)?) as an example. A few little things like this could make a weather system stand out as not just another particle effect. I guess in the end this idea is superstantial, and would merely be an example for most, and serious project devs would simply create their own weather system.

I'm getting very lonely without my nxOgre development time... I followed the "Practical Application" series Xavier wrote, and am at a stand still now, since the series ends rather abruptly after such an awesome buildup. I have no clue where to go with what I have so far . So hearing about new features boosts my morale

Keep up the great work betajaen!

I wrote two full replies to this, but because it's off-topic from this thread and quite important, I've split this topic into the 0.6 discussion thread.