Cosmic Engine is posted!

I am proud to announce the entire Cosmic Engine code base is now up in SVN on the Google Code Cosmic engine site. The link again is:

cosmic-engine - Project Hosting on Google Code

Of course, it's not exactly user (or even developer friendly) but it's an important milestone. Docs and tutorials as well as regular development updates will now happen there and as open source!

It's been a long time coming. I hope we can grow a great community around this tech stack.

Hoo-ray!

This sprint I promise!

Delays, delays.

So we didn't make the release by last Friday as planned, but I promise, if I have to hand carry each bit, we'll push it all up during this mini-sprint.

We had an entire office move right ontop of this sprint, literally the move was the same day of the sprint closing and this got cut.

Google Code for hosting

We have decided to set up our code hosting at Google Code. The link is:

cosmic-engine - Project Hosting on Google Code

There is next to nothing there now, but the first official drop will go up at the end of this week(!), then followed by regular roll outs until it's all up and refactored for public consumption.

Cosmic Engine goes Open Source

I just wanted to make a quick announcement because I can't wait any longer.

We will be releasing the Cosmic Engine and related technologies as open source within the next few weeks.

To begin we will host it at Google Code and the team will be working out of that repository directly. Additionally, we are committed to making it as easy as possible to build out of the (SVN) box with a NetBeans project that will build and run with little to no configuring and by including all the underlying layers in our stack (JOGL, jMonkeyEngine, MTGame, Avatars and all our secret sauce that we have yet to release to the wild)

We are still in development so this is not an orphaned project, but we have reached the point where enough outside parties need and should have access to the source to grow and refine it's feature and capabilities.

Digging up old videos

I was going through some of the old snap shots and videos that were taken during the development of the avatar animation system and I found recordings of the experiments done with the ZCam prototype I brought with me from my vacation in Israel last year :). The ZCam is a special camera that captures depth (in addition to the normal color and sound), this is the same\similar technology that is utilized by project Natal (see Microsoft's XBox360).

Here is a video showing a networked prototype:




Here is a video showing avatar movement:

Freezing the Avatars project on the Sun SVN

As you might already know Wonderland is going through a period of bug fixing in which no new features are added, we evaluated what are the things we would like to touch up before freezing the avatars repository which are used for wonderland integration*. First is a fix to the hair placement issue, each head skeleton has a special joint called "HairAttach", this joint is used to properly transform the hair into position. We made sure that all the head skeletons are set up nice. Another issue we ironed out is color modulation for every clothing item and the skin, the system supported this feature for a very long time now but we made common use of alternative techniques (that often gave better results) such as using texture blending tools (avaiable in the avatars project, but can also be done with common industry tools) to compose a custom texture. The latest commit to the repository changed all the defaut textures that are used by all clothing and skin to black and white, this insures that color modulation will yield the desired results.

In the picture you can see two avatars with white color modulation on the clothes and skin tone color modulation applied on the skin, the shoes, pants, shirt and hair can each be individually color modulated.

* https://avatars.dev.java.net/svn/avatars

Odd and Ends

We have been meaning to post for a while but just didn't get around to it, we have progress in multiple directions. In the Project Wonderland space we are reaping the benefits of the dedicated time we spent towards refactoring the entire avatar system. We got our internally developed collision solution integrated into our branch for 0.5. We load in our own custom environments and modestly begin designing the GUI\HUD of our implementation. Performance, download and load times are improving. We are in close contact with the team at Sun and we appreciate their plans to perform "feature freeze" and focus on stabilizing the overall system. We have found a need for a quick machine compatibility test application to help in the QA effort, before even considering the use of a certain machine in the studio for QA we make sure that machine passes the test - loading a smiling avatar via web start app.


On another front we have successfully developed a tool for soft body physics editing for 3D models. The output of that tool is exported into an iphone friendly format that is then loaded on the iphone and runs in an app developed by Kyle Roucis - one of our interns. We are experimenting various usages for this tech, it could possibly serve as a solid base for a heavily multi-threaded physics system that is based on verlet integration. I love verlet systems, it's lots of fun!


(This picture is outdated but it shows a verlet structure)