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| Alex Champandard Click the name for some bio info E-Mail: alex@base-sixteen.com

| 04/11/2000, Escape From Inactivity ;)

Since the last update...
My spring term at University was much busier than I'd anticipated. For the first few weeks, I spent most of my spare time writting the voxel landscape tutorial, cleaning up the source code I was about to release, and making sure the OpenGL version of the engine still worked. The main part of the term was occupied by my MCP module, the Microcomputer Project. My lab partner and I had to build a small Picollo Modem, capable of emitting and receiving characters encoded as sounds. The message is encoded as a frequency and amplitude modulated wave. The transmittion is nothing difficult, since most of it can be done in software. The hardware approach was quite novel to me, so I tried to avoid it, but looking back, I think i'd use that method instead. The reception and synchronisation on the other hand has to be mostly hardware based, and it took a lot of catching up in Digital And Linear Electronics to complete the project. I'm a bit ashamed to admit the reception software is still not quite working, due to the lack of precision in the signal analysis... a faster processor than our pittyful Z80 would help! Anyway, that was my excuse for not doing any graphics related stuff. I've now taken a small holiday, and ready to get going again :P
Escape, another landscape engine
I seem to have a 'thing' about landscape engines. The difference is this one has got more potential than terraVox, since it's hardware accelerated with OpenGL. The engine is fully parametric. A generic shader takes care of the procedural texturing. And what I call a shaper takes care of the parametric tessellation of the landscape mesh. So far, i've implemented a perlin noise texturiser to prevent the tiling effect, a quadratic bezier patch tessellator using forward differencing, and a fractal noise routine to make the curve look less perfect, and to add as much detail as required.
I've released a small beta demo of the engine, and launched the web site at the same time. Be sure to check that out for more information, and some screen shots.

> - 01/05/2002 - A.I., Websites and Voxels
> - 03/05/2001 - State Of The Art Character Animation
> - 01/24/2001 - Alternate Programming Languages
> - 01/11/2001 - The Sound Of Silence
> - 09/20/2000 - Engine prototypes, yet more landscape LOD and hard body physics
> - 07/13/2000 - Good Practice (TM)
> - 06/13/2000 - Revision Week Indeed
> - 04/11/2000 - Escape From Inactivity ;)
> - 01/05/2000 - Generic Shaders
> - 12/03/1999 - Start Of Term: Lots Of Good Intensions :)
> - 10/06/1999 - Dynamic LOD, Landscape Generation and much more...
> - 09/22/1999 - Water Contest Entry: Rendering Raytraced Refraction with 3D Hardware
> - 09/16/1999 - More About Bezier Patches And Fractals
> - 08/11/1999 - The Right Landscape Engine For You!
> - 07/12/1999 - Leftovers From The Contest: Fixing TP7's Runtime Error 200 bug
> - 07/01/1999 - Introduction

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