SpaceSim

This is probably my first full 3D game impleneted in C++ and OpenGL which is a coursework for the first semester in my MSc degree in Games Programming at the University of Hull, the specifications for the coursework was to make a game with a cubic spacestation with corridors guarded by defense guns and different types of barriers; Being Egyptian I prefered to give the space station an ancient egyptian flavour to stand out from the typical metalic like traditional stations that you see in every space game, and the result is what you see below in the screenshots.

I implemented a 3D model loader for loading Milkshape 3D ASCII files including textures and alpha maps and to store them in vertex arrays for OpenGL rendering, which gave me great flexibililty in the level design and texturing where I can model rooms and corridors with complex architecture, unlike my colleagues where most of them read the space station from custom configuration text files making it hard to add or remove guns, doors, forcefields, or even texture each room differently. However this imposed a challenge for collision detection as I had no data structure where I store the level data, but I managed to develop an algorithm to perform collision detection between bounding shapes (boxes, spheres, rays) and vertex triangle of the level data (spatially partitioned for efficiency and speed).

You can also notice vertex and pixel shader effects on the fighter shield and the forcefield twirling effect, all implemented in GLSL.

If you have any questions about the techniques or the algorithms used I’ll be more than happy to provide sample source code here on the portfolio (just drop a comment).

~ by youssefshady on May 2, 2008.