XNA DOOM3

Thursday, 3rd July 2008

This journal is starting to look a little drab, so here's a splash of colour.

2008.07.03.01.jpg.thumb.jpg

Not really all that colourful, on second thoughts. smile.gif I fancied a short break from BBC BASIC, and seeing that the current XNA CTP supports VS 2008 I thought I'd try a bit more work on hardware-accelerated 3D. I've never worked with shadows, bump mapping or visibility portals, and have a copy of DOOM 3, so thought that would provide a nice set of resources to experiment with.

2008.07.03.02.jpg.thumb.jpg

The screenshots are generated by simply brute-force rendering of all surfaces of all models in a level (.proc) file. The odd colours and lighting are courtesy of the default lighting provided by the BasicEffect class. The level files are simple to parse (they're just text files breaking each surface down into vertex and index arrays, ready to be fed to the video hardware), so though I've not found much documentation on them it's been pretty easy to guess what's what so far.

2008.07.03.03.jpg.thumb.jpg

The above textures are loaded by taking the material name and appending .tga, which seems to return a random mixture of specular, diffuse or normal maps. There is a materials directory that appears to contain definitions for which image file to use for each different type of texture map, so that looks like the next thing to investigate.

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