OpenGL Objects Position and Physics - java

I have two simple questions:
First question:
Given is an object in OpenGL in an android application.
I want to apply phyics on the object like Gravtiy.
For this I've implemented a Public PositionVector {x,y,z,1.0f};
In the Object Object. So for example: Sphere.PositionVector = {0f,0f,0f,1f}
for the center of screen.
When I do the movement now, I have a modelMatrix and to update the Position should I multiply the modelMatrix with the PositionVector? But then I will still get 0,0,0,1.
mulitplyMV(tempVector,0,modelMatrix,0,PositionVector,0);
Where is the mistake? Or: What is the usual way to do this?
My goal is to have always the current positionvector of the Sphere.
Second question:
Does the shader have to do anything with the physics? Or may I calculate the gravtiy and the resulting vectors in the javaCode and apply then a translateMatrix to the modelMatrix?
Greetings,
Phil

So the first thing that really jumped out at me, was the question about movement. Normally if the movement was only for a visual effect, multiplying your position with a model matrix would be fine, but obviously you'll be wanting to handle collisions and that sort of thing as well.
What I normally do, is I keep track of each objects position, and update that value whenever it moves. When I draw my object, I first do a pass to leave out all objects that aren't in view and then only draw what my camera is seeing. So in this case, you'll only be drawing what is actually visible on the phone's screen at the moment.
So if you have a view matrix for your camera, to keep it simple for now you can leave out view culling, but you'll multiply your objects current position with the model matrix(in this case it is just an identity so it doesn't have any impact), and additionally with the view matrix and projection matrix. So its something like vec3 viewSpacePosition = projectionMatrix * viewMatrix * modelMatrix * position; (assuming I'm remembering that one correctly.)
Your physics calculations can be done either in your shaders or in your java code, though I recommend doing it on the java side while still getting the hang of things. OpenCL and transform feedback buffers can be quite tricky when you're still learning how some of the stuff works.
For the physics portion of your code, I would highly recommend taking a look an Glen Fiedler's series on game physics, you can find it here.
If you have any more questions, or if there is something you're still uncertain of let me know. :) Good luck!

Related

2D Moving Camera (LWJGL)

I'm currently developing a 2D RPG with LWJGL, and am still in the engine stage of development. I've got a lot of the tech I want created, but one of my big problems is fixing the camera on the player. All the solutions I've seen involve moving the world and keeping the player still, which can work, but it seems apparent that this can cause some calculation issues if not closely monitored. Normally, I'd write a system where I wouldn't have to worry about it, but I refuse, because I eventually intend on adding multiplayer capability, where a moving world would be unplayable.
Is there a way to affix the camera to an object or point that can move WITHOUT using translate to move the world around? Also, I'd like to avoid Slick if possible. That would require me to rework much of my game engine as it currently stands.
Whenever you are going to project the 3d viewport onto a 2d screen you need to move everything according to the point of view of the observer (the so called camera or view).
I guess you can't escape from this. What you usually do is having a Camera object which holds position and rotation that is used to build the view matrix which is passed to the vertices of your scene through a uniform to the shaders. Passing transformation matrices to shaders is the normality so you shouldn't feel burdened by it. You can always premultiply it with the perspective matrix.
You must move the whole world to match the position of your camera just because you need to transform everything in your scene as it is seen from that point of view, otherwise how could you then project it on your screen? There is no "move the camera, keep the world still" concept.
Move the world visually, it's how every other RPG does it. Don't move the actual world's location though.
Draw everything but the ui normally, than translate it all according to the players position (i.e. glTranslate2f(-player.x,-player.y)). This is all done in the render method. On networked multiplayer, the viewport is done to that specific player (i.e. Bob's screen is translated based off Bob's position, Jane's is translated based off Jane's position). Should you instead want single-screen multiplayer, you will probably have to use mutliple framebuffers (one per player), and use them as viewports.

Third Person Perspective Camera with Opengl

I want to implement a TPP Camera for my project, but something is not working + i don't know if i use the right concept.
Should I rotate the whole scene model-view matrices except my main model, which will be centered on the screen or rotate the lookAt camera?
Other thing is how to make the model move in given direction after rotating? (I think moving the whole scene makes it easier?) + how to add collision detection to it?
Collision detection is nothing to do with openGL you use you game state variables to work that out you can manage it in the same loop as the game where you do user input and display.
You should use a LookAtMatrix for the third person camera you will have the eye component behind the player and the at somewhere infront. Persective can be implemented by using a perspective matrix.
So the matrix multiplication will look like.
PerspectiveMatrix * LookAtMatrix * worldSpacePosition
Here is a good answer from gamedev explaining a lookatmatrix, most OpenGL / Computer Graphics books will also cover this.
Are you working with the new or old pipeline model?

3D Game Geometry

I have a simple game that uses a 3D grid representation, something like:
Blocks grid[10][10][10];
The person in the game is represented by a point and a sight vector:
double x,y,z, dx,dy,dz;
I draw the grid with 3 nested for loops:
for(...) for(...) for(...)
draw(grid[i][j][k]);
The obvious problem with this is when the size of the grid grows within the hundreds, fps drop dramatically. With some intuition, I realized that:
Blocks that were hidden by other blocks in the grid don't need to be rendered
Blocks that were not within the person's vision field also don't need to be rendered (ie. blocks that were behind the person)
My question is, given a grid[][][], a person's x,y,z, and a sight vector dx,dy,dz, how could I figure out which blocks need to be rendered and which don't?
I looked into using JMonkeyEngine, a 3D game engine, a while back and looked at some of the techniques they employ. From what I remember, they use something called culling. They build a tree structure of everything that exists in the 'world'. The idea then is that you have a subset of this tree that represents the visible objects at any given time. In other words, these are the things that need to be rendered. So, say for example that I have a room with objects in the room. The room is on the tree and the objects in the room are children of the tree. If I am outside of the room, then I prune (remove) this branch of the tree which then means I don't render it. The reason this works so well is that I don't have to evaluate EVERY object in the world to see if it should be rendered, but instead I quickly prune whole portions of the world that I know shouldn't be rendered.
Even better, then when I step inside the room, I trim the entire rest of the world from the tree and then only render the room and all its descendants.
I think a lot of the design decisions that the JMonkeyEngine team made were based on things in David Eberly's book, 3D Game Engine Design. I don't know the technical details of how to implement an approach like this, but I bet this book would be a great starting point for you.
Here is an interesting article on some different culling algorithms:
View Frustum Culling
Back-face Culling
Cell-based occlusion culling
PVS-based arbitrary geometry occlusion culling
Others
First you need a spatial partitioning structure, if you are using uniform block sizes, probably the most effective structure will be an octree. Then you will need to write an algorithm that can calculate if a box is on a particular side of (or intersecting) a plane. Once you have that you can work out which leaf nodes of the octree are inside the six sides of your view frustum - that's view culling. Also using the octree you can determine which blocks occlude others (sometimes called frustum masking), but get the first part working first.
It sounds like you're going for a minecraft-y type thing.
Take a look at this android minecraft level renderer.
The points to note are:
You only have to draw the faces of blocks that are shared with transparent blocks. e.g.: don't bother drawing the faces between two opaque blocks - the player will never see them.
You'll probably want to batch up your visible block geometry into chunklets (and stick it into a VBO) and determine visibility on a per-chunklet basis. Finding exactly which blocks can be seen will probably take longer than just flinging the VBO at the gpu and accepting the overdraw.
A flood-fill works pretty well to determine which chunklets are visible - limit the fill using the view frustum, view direction (if you're facing in the +ve x direction, don't flood in the -ve direction), and simple analyses of chunklet data (e.g.: if an entire face of a chunklet is opaque, don't flood through that face)

Getting nearest focused object in opengl

I'm making a minecraft-inspired game through Java LWJGL, which is heavy into development already. However, I am not quite sure what method I would use to pick/highlight the nearest block in the exact center of the player's view frustum.
I am already storing frustum and positional data, which I could use.
I had a vague idea about using raycasting, but this seems to be unrelated based on what people have done with raycasting.
So which function or test would I use to determine this?
Raycasting will definitively work. You need to create a ray from the orientation of your camera and its position.
If your camera rotation matrix has no scale, the axis is the third column ( the z-axis ). Now depending on your convention, z axis may point to screen or to the world

How would one implement an FPS camera?

So I'm currently working on some FPS game programming in OpenGL (JOGL, more specifically) just for fun and I wanted to know what would be the recommended way to create an FPS-like camera?
At the moment I basically have a vector for the direction the player is facing, which will be added to the current player position upon pressing the "w" or forward key. The negative of that vector is of course used for the "s" or backward key. For "a", left, and "d", right I use the normal of the direction vector. (I am aware that this would let the player fly, but that is not a problem at the moment)
Upon moving the mouse, the direction vector will be rotated using trigonometry and matrices. All vectors are, of course, normalized for easy speed control.
Is this the common and/or good way or is there an easier/better way?
The way I have always seen it done is using two angles, yaw and pitch. The two axes of mouse movement correspond to changes in these angles.
You can calculate the forward vector easily with a spherical-to-rectangular coordinate transformation. (pitch=latitude=φ, yaw=longitude=θ)
You can use a fixed up vector (say (0,0,1)) but this means you can't look directly upwards or downwards. (Most games solve this by allowing you to look no steeper than 89.999 degrees.)
The right vector is then the cross product of the forward and up vectors. It will always be parallel to the ground plane since the up vector is always perpendicular to the ground plane.
Left/right strafe keys then use the +/-right vector. For a forward vector parallel to the ground plane, you can take the cross product of the right and the up vectors.
As for the GL part, you can simply use gluLookAt() using the player's origin, the origin plus the forward vector and the up vector.
Oh and please, please add an "invert mouse" option.
Edit: Here's an alternative solution which gets rid of the 89.9 problem, asked in another question, which involves building the right vector first (with no pitch information) and then forward and up.
Yes, thats essentially the way I have always seen it done.
Yeah, but in the end you will want to add various other attributes to the camera. To spell it n00b: keep it tidy if you want to mimic Quake or CS. In the end might have bobing, FoV, motion filtering, network lag suspension and more.
Cameras are actually one of the more difficult parts to make in a good game. That's why developers usually are content with a seriously dull, fixed 1st/3rd person ditto.
You could use Quaternions for your camera rotation. Although I have not tried it myself, they are useful for avoiding gimbal lock.

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