Refractive Sphere

After a lot of days of silence, let's start again the APOCALYX 3D Engine daily posts. Today just a short old news: I simply signal an old paper of mine that describes how to simulate a refractive (and reflective) perfect sphere with just two triangles.

In DemoPack1 is available a demo (RefractiveSphere.lua) about the subject.

The article dates back to 2004, so it explains how to simulate a sphere through fragment programs. Now the same effect can be accomplished much more easily using fragment shaders and the GLSL language, but the theory behind the scene is still interesting.

Download the paper from here: RefractiveSphere.pdf.

Third Person Shooter (II)

Other screenshots from Miguel Manchego Rivas' Simple Shooter.

You can download the demo from the Users' Gallery. Feel free to submit your little demos, even if you find the quality of yours worse that Miguel's ones. Thank you in advance!

Third Person Shooter

Other screenshots from the Miguel Manchego Rivas' demos. This is the time of the Simple Shooter that you can find, as usual, in the Users' Gallery.

As you can see, the features of the demo resemble those of my Urban Tactics. The main important different is that the avatar can jump and walk on ramps, while in Urban Tactics the level is completely flat.
Another difference is the use of level items (items placed in the GtkRadiant Level Editor) to place objects, such as medikits, in the scenery.
Both these improvements were already available in Treasure Hunter, but jumps are much more fluid here.

Treasure Hunter (II)

Other two screenshots from Treasure Hunter. Visit the Users' Gallery for more.

Treasure Hunter

Just a few screenshots from "Treasure Hunter", a side-scroller demo realized years ago by Miguel Manchego Rivas.

If you have developed games or demos using APOCALYX, feel free to submit them, even if they use very few functionalities. I'll be very happy to host them in the Users' Demos page.
Thank you in advance!

Unicode fonts

Another quite hidden feature of APOCALYX is the support of UNICODE true type fonts.

You can find a demo showing how to display UNICODE true type fonts in "UnicodeTrueTypeFonts.lua" included in DemoPack2.
As you can see in the screenshot, after a true type font has been loaded in the engine, there are several different ways to use it to display texts. This feature is brought to you thanks to the FTGL and OGLFT libraires included in the engine.

Multiple viewports

Probably this is one of the most hidden features of the engine, but APOCALYX can also support multiple viewports.

There are several kinds of viewports: first of all, the world scene can be seen from different points of view, then also other simplified 3D worlds independent from the main scene can be rendered in their own viewport. To see the feature at work, try the "Viewports.lua" demo in DemoPack1.