Darkwind Media Blog

I found this little demo video on my machine the other day. This demo shows an engine we were working on previously for a competition being held at RIT. It was required to be fully 2D, no 3D polygonal models here. We weren’t happy with the traditional 2D feel of graphics, so we put in pseudo-3D lighting (2.5D lighting?) and normal mapping. Our fully 2D sprites started looking 3D with dynamic lighting and normal mapping.

I no longer update the Odyssey Framework that is mentioned in the video. It is available on sourceforge still, if you are interested. Luster has taken over as my prime focus.

Hope you enjoy this look back on previous work by our team!

Without too much fanfare here is a video of our simplest tech demo:

It shows a short but very hi-res snippet of BBC’s Planet Earth documentary playing in a 3D environment. It allows for some minimal user interaction. This came about one night because I decided to see how quickly I could make a simple demo in Luster. Turns out, pretty quickly. I finished this in about 1 hour, and it took 78 lines of code. Most of that was simple scene setup (position lights, position cube, position camera, etc.).

We also want to let everyone know that Luster is starting to come out of its shell. For the next few months a student at RIT is using Luster to create a demo inside of the dome. The demo is a 3D version of Asteriods using the Wii Remote for control. In order for this to work Luster must render in 4 viewports in super-widescreen, which then gets wrapped all around you to create immersion. Some of you may have experienced this before in CAVE installations, or even in an Imax theater.

I have been working on the promised demos, but my progress has slowed because of platform rewrites. I’m revising some parts of the core to enable extended features. I promise exciting demos, and even more exciting application ideas to come in the future.