geeeeeez you're only 17? I think the shots look fantastic, I wish i had half that much ambition when I was 17. Keep it up, you're gonna go real far.

What about "F-Zero"? Just kidding...

Keep up the good work.

Tuler

Wow cool.. I'm 17 as well! Nice stuff man, keep up the good work. Glad to see some other teenagers getting some work done in the world! =)

--m0rphic

wow.. the same age, and done so much yet i'm dreaming just about..

wow

und deine schule unterstuetzt dich auch noch dabei, *neid*.. ich bin aus der schule ausgestiegen ( nach den 9 obli jahren, klaro;) ), weil ich mich entscheiden musste, meine schule tat gar nichts in der richtung.. klasse man, gratulation

This pisses me off. I'm two years older than you and you've accomplished a lot more than I have. Damnit!

Nice work btw! I don't think that it's a good idea to "not to use foreign programs". Reinventing the wheel is something that I never quite found rewarding. Why is this so prominent in the gaming industry but nowhere else?

The level editor for instance could have just as easily been WorldCraft or Q3Radiant (which have source available I think).

Still, nice work.

I applaud your decision to make your own tools, I do that as much as I can so I know exactly what I'm working with, and can change it when necessary. Do octtrees really work well with arbitrary geometry like that? I thought for indoor environments its best to use bsp or portals, and octrees work best for terrain.

If you want a better name suggestion we'll need more info about the game, is it futuristic? Does it have a theme? What's it about?

Nice shots anyways,
-David-

I think it's because a lot of programmers (myself included) are control freaks. They can't handle it if they don't have full power over each aspect of their program. Learning to control this obsession is the first step of the 1000-mile journey to becoming a great developer. If anyone succeeds at this, tell me how ;-)

Jan.. Hmm.. Then how come this doesn't apply to things such as sound-libraries? Most people don't write their own sound-libraries. Input libraries are another thing.

It puzzles me. If I can get code for free (and if I can see the source then even better!) I'll use it! Assuming it does ALL that I wanted to do in the first place.
If I have a few optimizations I think nobody else has thought about, then I'll code it myself.

Programming is one of the few industries where laziness is a virtue.

-goltrpoat

Sure, ask some Visual Basic programmers :)

Well, doh! Its much easier to do a terrain engine than an mp3 decoder. And there's alot more info on terrain generators(could be some other engine).

Building all your own tools can grow your development time greatly.

For every month you don't ship you've got no new revenue, but still have to pay salaries, rent, supplies, utilities, consultation fees, etc. etc. It's expensive to run a business, particularly when you don't have revenue until your game breaks even.

It's not laziness, it's called having a clue.

Shiiiiit boyyyyy.... it's all demoscene related, we all used a soundlib but wanted to do the cool gfx-fx ourselves :)

Funny thing is that I tried building a Quadtree engine similar to yours last year (when I was 17 and starting senior year high school ;). But I never got as far as you cuz for me school was more of a hinderance then helper. Must be different in Germany, but here English, Sociology, the Americican version of History and other useless crap are held far more important than math or programming classes, it is stupid that they teach you to go twards what they want not what you want.

Anyways, just wanted to say that it is looking good and keep it up. I see that at least you could use DirectX without problem. I had to give up on it and start using OpenGL, again. Oh and try using brute force databases(large arrays of verts), because quadtrees aren't that T&L friendly,.

Keep in mind that a large majority of us are not getting paid to make the things that we do. A moderately sized game project has so many parts and requires so many talents that it's extremely difficult to finish anything alone, and even harder to find good people to work with. A smaller project such as a level editor may take alot of time to create, and may not be as well organized as some other system like WorldCraft or Q3Radiant, but it's feasible and can be completed in far less time than a full game. I think this is why we see so many people re-inventing the wheel in this field. It's just plain fun.

Knowing that it's your code and your code alone that makes up a program is a great feeling, and it's even better when you finish that program. That's how I got started with all of this, I looked at a terrain shot about a year and a half ago and said "Hey, I can do that. Yeah, I'm gonna do that" and I went off and I did it. I was so happy when it actually worked that I fired off an email to Kurt the same day asking to post it as an IOTD. Before he responded, I figured out how to add some basic vertex lighting and took my first screenshot.

I'm still a little embarassed by the outcome, but that's okay, because it was just a first try. Anyways, the point of all this is that we've got to take a step back and realize that some of us are just doing it because it's fun, no more.

Oh yeah, almost forgot.... Nice shots.

Um, you do realize that I was saying that it is better to reuse tools instead of writing your own, right?



Part of having a clue is reading the post before replying.

Hey, half the digital sound libs out there came out of the demo scene :). FMod (by FireLight), mikmod (by mikmak), Midas (by.. uh.. I don't remember), etc.

-goltrpoat

Laziness is NOT good. Common sense is.

You should spend all the time you would have spent reinventing the whell on perfecting your code so that it is well-commented and easy-to-read. Constantly re-writing sloppy hacks and such.

You shouldn't be lazy. I often write the better part of entire projects twice. Once to get it working, and the second time to get it right (using lessons learnt from the first time). This all happens incrementally of course, module by module.

You're right. Whenever I program something and use other people's modules I always think "Ah I really didn't do anything hard, I merely glued these modules together added some math code here". So when people say "wow that's great" I always feel guilty saying "thanks".

I just accepted OpenGL as "the metal" for my programming, so I don't feel to guilty about using an API to do 3D-rendering anymore. But it's hard with other libs.

Still, I intellectually know that it's far more effecient to use other people's code. No matter what you do there's almost always someone else who's already done it, and better than you'd do it.
I think much of the reason game programmers (and only game programmers) refuse to use other peoples work is because we think we're smarter than everyone else and thus we don't trust anyone else to do a better job at something than we would.

No, laziness is great. If I wasn't lazy, I wouldn't write design specs before implementing new systems and require others to do the same, or use OOD, or implement housekeeping functions before everything else, etc.

You shouldn't be lazy. I often write the better part of entire projects twice.
Um.. and that's a good thing how exactly?

-goltrpoat

Yeah yo... I am 17 too...

I went to the Illinois Math and Science Academy www.imsa.edu. and still they were focusing a lot more on foreign languages, history, and "English". It's not an english class anymore dammit, it's just literature that the teacher wants us to read. So pissed off!! They didn't even let me take computer science classes until junior year!!!!!! AGH! by that time, I was knew everything covered in the class. Such a waste...

For those still in HighSchool, participate in ACSL!!! www.acsl.org.

Me and other team members got 2nd place (Senior Team-5 person) internationals last year, it's not too hard... If you're a good team, you can make it!

might take more time to read, understand and write anything...
but an the other hand there are far to much people out there who start out with opengl (or directx or whatever) and have no clue at all how everything works behind the scenes. like they don't even know what a rasterizer is and what it does. only because they felt that they didn't want to reinvent the wheel. what i'm trying to say is that it's always good if you get as much knowledege as you can get. and you can certainly achieve better work when you have an understanding of how things really work. writing you own tools gives yis a great possiblity for that. because there are like half a million things that tend to apear only in the level creation phase like raytracing the lightmaps, CSG, etc. you would never get invloved with that kind of stuff if you just wrote a rendering pipeline.

i think that's just because most people don't bother with true design and technical skills. they just want to write a 3d rendering pipeline and take that to write a way cool game. finishing that rather simple 3d rendering pipeline they get aware of the fact that there is much more to a game than just cool 3d gfx. so if they'd the ambition to become real programmers they'd jst go out and read articles about software/game design. i mean there are far to much people out there who can't really programm c/c++ but think that copying source code from the net will bring them a cool game.

talking about other peoples libs.
there are so many open source libs on the net. why is it so hard to just read the source code of other people and read what they did and decide wether their idea was good or not and try to get something out for yourself. there cretainly is a difference between just pluging a lib into you prog or really trying to understand want the author intended it to do.

>Because of my philosophy not to use "foreign" programs I have attempted to do everything myself. And it has worked until now ...

eh?? You wrote yourself like programming language+glut/motif+opengl+windows?

If you did, damn!!!

Otherwise, you're always using other ppl's code, sometimes w/o realizing it.

=)

Rather good IOTD, today. I think you have chosen the right approach.
"Reinventing the wheel" is very usefull occupation, especially if you want to have deeper understanding of how it spins. ;) Some folks here told a lot of their thoughts about using libs and reusing smbody's code. Some thoughts are very bright, but I think they are adressing another space. The real programmer should resolve such equations from the point of view on his problem, not the coolness of library or smbdy's code. So if you saw smbdy's cool terrain engine you should not try to do your own or even do a remake of smbdy's code, but if you need to do terrain engine, persuating some estimated results, such as profit, education, expierence etc, you MUST DO IT BETTER, even if you are NOT SMARTER. It is possible, believe me. I can evene say there are a lot of ways to make your code better than anyone's else(of course in some
specific areas). So you can make more readable code, more reusable,
faster one, more configurable, more well-designed, add on your own taste. Everything depends on your individuality.

P.S. As for myself, I'm eighteen. I have done some stuff before(
several serious system apps for WinNT, some winsock code,several MFC applications, some graphics stuff(filtration, 2d effects, compression, rasterization, convolution ,etc), some parsing code(
expression calc, differentiation, graph plotting, preprocessing html, without use of lex and yacc), etc), but hence some of this was even made for profit, all this stuff is far from the perfectance, needed to release the sources(currently most code "features" bad formatting, no makefiles, bad OOP design(if C++), if optimized it is completely not readable, if not it enomoursly slow, most classes, funcs and variable names are "taken from the roof"(esp. in older code)). I even have doubts about releasing to the public the stuff I am currently involved into. ;) Anyway I hope you'll soon see my IOTD(in about two months). Guess what it'll be. ;)

I think you are confusing octrees with quadtrees. Quadtrees are generally used for terrain, as terrain is pretty much isolated to the XZ plane. Octrees represent an R3 space and are much more adept at containing indoor data, where you have levels over levels, bridges etc.

> Midas (by.. uh.. I don't remember)

Petteri Kangaslampi.

A cow with six legs?

Hey there!

Nice Job.. Do you use MFC?
I'm 16 now and started working on a Leveleditor back when I was 15 (in dev for about 8 months now)... I guess in a few months it'll be as far as yours.. you can actually look at some screenshots here.

I'm workin' on a team with 2 programmers, the other guy is programming the engine, so I don't really have to worry 'bout that. (But we DO talk about diffrent engine issues hehe)..

I choosed OGL over D3D first off all because I knew OGL and 2nd because I was/am running on NT 4.0 which means no Direct3D for me :o)

'Bout school and programming:... Boy, be happy if you learn something during your Informatic classes... I don't.. I even had to correct my teacher and tell him that indices in C start at 0. (He wrote down a Bubble Sort algo to the blackboard and asked me to tell me why this works.. making mistakes while copying it from a book har har).

Anyway, keep the good work up!
cya,
Phil

Phil "HangMan" Aumayr
Rarebyte Programmer
www.rarebyte.com