Sandbox "Game"

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Built With
• Features
• Acknowledgements
• Changelog

Overview

This project was developed during my high school software development independent study over the course of about 10 weeks. It's a more than basic sandbox "game" for me to implement and learn how game design works with Java and the Light Weight Java Game Library (LWJGL). It is much less a game, and more a collection of a few game design concepts and 3D graphics implementation.

This is the final update video I made for the class. While it doesn't go over and cover everything, most everything is at least on display in the video. You can view the entire plan and changelog below and watch all of the video changelogs if you want to.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/65475597/207750643-c3e15da5-7045-4c33-8cfb-7bfbeda1e21e.mp4

Built With

JAVA with LWJGL for graphics. Eclipse IDE Blender to design models and animations XML to store model animation data

Skills

Java, OOP, XML, 3D graphics, shaders, 3D animation, Blender, Python

Features

• 3D graphics using shaders and renderers
• 3D model importing
• 3D animations
• Up to 3 dynamic light sources
• Basic box collision detection
• Simplified and basic physics
• File converter to convert from blender files to custom XML object format
• View video changelogs

Acknowledgements

ThinMatrix on YouTube has a playlist teaching LWJGL and was an amazing learning resource.

Changelog

Week10: Animations Complete

• Finished implementation of a basic animation system
• Animations are properly transformed
• Bug with the size of an XML model; Can be hack-fixed by hard-scaling model in-engine
• Ability to pause, resume, end, or begin playing an animation
• Able to change the speed the animation runs at
• Animation ending options: Loop, pause
• 'AnimatedModel' now extends 'Model' without repetition
• Issue: XMLObjects are loaded twice; Potential fix, load a false model into the parent 'Entity' constructor and the true model into the 'AnimatedEntity' constructor (or vise versa)
• Fixed Player walking animation
• Added Tree falling animation
• Trees fall over when clicked on

Week9: Animation Implementation:

• Began implementing animations into the game engine
• Added an Animated Entity with basic data (Lacks full extendability of regular entity for now)
• Added a hierarchal bone class
• Added an animation class to store animation data on game load
• Added an animator to control an object's animations
• Added animation renderer
• Added animation shaders
• Managed to get close workings of animation renderer after first the couple tries

Week8: Animation Exporting cont:

• Extended converter program to convert skinning and animation data to custom format
• Experimented with programming an exporter add-on (DELAYED)

Week7: Animation Exporting:

• Exported Blender object to COLLADA file format
• Designed custom file format for model data, including mesh and animations
• Converted mesh data from COLLADA format to custom game format, using XML

Week6: Animations

• Learned how to rig a skeleton to a mesh in Blender
• Learned to weight paint
• Learned to animate a skeleton

Week5: Interact via Ray-Cast

• Added debug points
• Added a ray cast from the screen crosshair
• Detected objects along the ray
• Called method on intersecting objects once for every click
• Initiated only the nearest object's method along the ray
• Added a method for entities when they are clicked on
• Added a method for entities when the cursor hovers over them
• Put pumpkin into its own class; can now be called with 1 line of code instead of 7

Week4: GUI/Text

• Added and implemented GUI renderer
• Added and implemented GUI shaders
• Added GUI objects
• Added crosshair
• Added text boxes
• Added font loading
• Added text rendering
• Text of a textbox is now dynamic
• Text works at different font sizes
• Added a view
• Added an FPS counter
• Added a debug manager class to handle all debug modes
• Changed loader to be static

Week3: Debug

• Implemented sub-debug mode system
• Added sub-debug modes; Hitbox, Coords, Debug Lines
• Added Debug Lines
• Extended Coord debug view

Week2: Entity Components

• Implemented component-based entity system
• Added gravity component
• Added dynamic component
• Implemented project with this GitHub

Week1: Random Terrain

• Cleaned up value noise algorithm
• Added flexibility to value noise
• Fixed dual-coloring bug
• Varied colors-
• Added height-dependant colors