3D Starchart - Teaser 1: Rendering Planets

Here’s another update. Greatly improves system selection, including showing the name as you move over it (although it has a horrible magenta flash each time, but that could just be me). Made the gate lines green (I had also intended to make systems with both gate & hole use yellow, but that wasn’t as simple as it sounded) and gave gates precedence over holes. Less strict model loading, so Omicron Alpha (and perhaps others) will load. Even more memory fixes. Improved font support (e.g. Lübeck in Hamburg). As before, this is just the binaries plus patch (for r116).

@obstbaum:

Nice job so far on this, i am having allot of fun working with it.

I am wondering though, if you have any ideas on how to go about using the left mouse button to select scene objects and have them highlighted like in FL when you select something. I tried a few ideas but nothing has really worked yet.

For what i am doing i added a combobox that is populated with all the valid system objects of which i can select items, move the camera close to it, and show the objects properties in a property grid. but i would prefer to use the left mouse button in the scene to select them instead.

–—

I have also started extending the FLApi to add in a Faction Class, and classes for the Market ie:

FLApi.Market.Commodities, FLApi.Market.Ships, FLApi.Market.Equipement

i just started on them so no real code yet.

the Class: FLApi.Factions.FLFaction is working fine, all it really does though is to parse the initialworld.ini to retrieve the Proper name of factions. Although this will be extended to include a list of their reputations with other factions, which will be easy enough to do , just have not coded it yet.

I am also working on extending the Costume class , which so far was a simple thing since you already had the code in place and parsing out those lines anyway. Again, plans are to extend this Class.

Because of the project i am using these in i had to convert the Starchart project into VB.NET, but somewhere along the lines of the conversion process something went wrong and now Planets are not being physically rendered in the scene, which also has a side effect of messing up the scene lighting. I have not really delved into this problem too much.

Anyway Cheers, and nice job so far.

WoW! Its amazing!!! Whats left now is the fields, suns and maby even effects… Too bad I can’t help you…

Well i am casting a ray from the mouse x,y into 3d space. this is the function that handles that:

Ray GetPickRay()
        {
            MouseState mouseState = Mouse.GetState();

            int mouseX = mouseState.X;
            int mouseY = mouseState.Y;

            Vector3 nearsource = new Vector3((float)mouseX, (float)mouseY, 0f);
            Vector3 farsource = new Vector3((float)mouseX, (float)mouseY, 1f);

            Matrix world = Matrix.CreateTranslation(0, 0, 0);

            Vector3 nearPoint = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(nearsource,
                proj, view, world);

            Vector3 farPoint = GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Unproject(farsource,
                proj, view, world);

            // Create a ray from the near clip plane to the far clip plane.
            Vector3 direction = farPoint - nearPoint;
            direction.Normalize();
            Ray pickRay = new Ray(nearPoint, direction);

            return pickRay;
        }

the problem comes in when i loop through all the objects in the scene to get the object that is suppose to be selected the result value returned from ray.intersects is always : -1.#IND

so i tried changing the farSource to be the static system size, which does not really work at all except to move the camera to above the sun, or in the case of New York System, sometimes above West Point (mostly though is ends up above the sun)
–-

forgive my ignorance of XNA here, i have not done allot with XNA so still feeling my way around to a large degree.

and for the planet rendering issue, i am not at all sure what is going on, the code is pretty much identical (just written in VB.NET not C#). As i said, the Planets are being added as valid system objects but just nothing rendering, or maybe they are rendering but could it be that the ‘scale’ of the planets is not being calculated right? not sure to be honest, my code matches yours so not sure what i am doing wrong.

I may try changing my app into C# and see if that changes anything.

to your question about why VB.NET instead of using C#? well mostly because i am more comfortable in VB environment. Nothing to do with the language or anything. And secondly, because i can. Also because there is a few quirks about C# i am not fond of.

Don’t get me wrong though, i can code in C# just as well as VB or C++.

well well, i will be a g*&&^ d&^*&^& monkey’s uncle.

i did a quite conversion to C# of part of my project and bang, planets and proper lighting.

so i am moving forward to redo my project in solid C#.

anyway just thought i would let you know , cheers.

i have a probleme with a custom FL :
“mat count 11!=12” or something similar.
i will post the exact message when i have some more time.
I think it’s a probleme in the mod file, but didn’t crash the game, anyway to ignore it and continue ?

Good job for your 0.5 release, it’s work like a charm on vanilla FL, fast and precise

Wait… Does it read costum models? Or I’ll have to wait for the Beta for that?

No worries mate, i did not take it as a religious ‘C# vs VB/NET’ war. :P.

for converting code to and from c# to vb.net i use this:

http://converter.telerik.com/

works pretty good.

you just have to watch out though, some adjustments to the code need to be done.

for example, in your xna classes the object:

private Game game;

in VB would be:

private game as Game

but this will not work, so what i did is to simply change the varaible name to: igame:

private igame as Game

once you go to the page, copy your entire class code, paste it into the top textarea, and click convert. rinse repeat for each one.

there may be other things that may need to be adjusted once you put the converted code into a vb project but those should be pretty simple to do.

and to get the game to run you need to import the system.threading namespace, and do something like this, at least this is what i had to do:

Dim gameThread As Thread 'class level decaration

i put the thread start in the sub new, as mentioned below, because i have the game embedded in a custom user control.

public sub new()
gameThread = New Thread(AddressOf RunGame)
gameThread.Start()
end sub

private sub RunGame()
igame = New MainGame(mhandle, fdata, 1280, 720, True)
igame.Run()
end sub

i have embedded the game inside a windows usercontrol and then inside a windows form.

here is a screenshot of it in it’s VB.NET version, and as you can see, lighting is all messed up because of the lack of planet rendering. And like i mentioned, I am still feeling my way around XNA. Using VB.NET or C# for game development is kinda foreign territory for me, for game dev i am use to C++, this though is kinda different. Although, C# feels more comfortable than VB for this.

if you use MSN, you can get me there at: r.orr AT hotmail DOT ca

This looked pretty cool, so I downloaded the binaries.

WARNING: The runtime version supported by this application is unavailable.
Using default runtime: v1.1.4322

** (Starchart.exe:10299): WARNING **: The following assembly referenced from /home/alex/Downloads/FLStarchart/Starchart.exe could not be loaded:
Assembly: Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game (assemblyref_index=0)
Version: 4.0.0.0
Public Key: 842cf8be1de50553
The assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly (/home/alex/Downloads/FLStarchart/).

** (Starchart.exe:10299): WARNING **: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=842cf8be1de50553’ or one of its dependencies.

Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=842cf8be1de50553’ or one of its dependencies.
File name: “Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=842cf8be1de50553”

And under Windows:

Any ideas?

Have you installed the XNA framework? Seems like XNA 4 is what you need:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=a88c6dec-aeae-42cd-a108-d35c013c3b97

Thats good news about the object selection, i will eagerly wait for the 06 release.

for costumes it is really not that difficult to get than to display

In: FLApi.Characters.Costume.cs, change it to look like this:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using Microsoft.Xna.Framework;
using FLApi;
using FLApi.Solar;
using FLApi.Universe;
using FLParser;
using FLParser.Ini;
using FLParser.Utf;

namespace FLApi.Characters
{
    public class Costume
    {

        /// <summary>/// Gets or Sets the selected SpaceObject's Docking Character Costume
        ///</summary> 
        public string costume 
        {
            set
            {
                m_costume = value;
                setcostume();
            }
            get
            {
                return m_costume;
            }
        }
        private string m_costume;

        public Costume(string s1, string s2)
        {
            if (s1 == null) s1 = "";
            if (s2 == null) s2 = "";

            if (s1 != String.Empty && s2 == String.Empty) this.costume = s1;
            if (s1 == String.Empty && s2 != String.Empty) this.costume = s2;            
            if (s1 != String.Empty && s2 != String.Empty) this.costume = s1 + ", " + s2;            
        }

        /// <summary>/// changes the spacecostume for the selected spaceobject
        ///</summary> 
        private void setcostume(string newcostume = "")
        {
            // TODO: code it to allow changing the space_costume (Class: FLAPi.Characters.Costume, Function: setcostume(string newcostume = ""))
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(newcostume))
            {
                this.m_costume = newcostume;
            }
        }
    }
}

then in FLApi.Universe.SpaceObject.cs

in function: public SpaceObject(…)

locate: case “space_costume”:

and the line before: break;
change it to:
SpaceCostume = new Costume(e[0].ToString(), e[1].ToString());

and when you want to display the costume string read it from the costume property:

spaceObject.SpaceCostume.costume;

Dammit, it doesn’t even work on my Windows (Vista Ultimate)!!!

what doesn’t work?

The program, what ealse?