Physigons Windows game

Physigons is a game I made a few months ago, and I recently completed version 1.2.1 - good enough for a release, I think.

1.2 Trailer - Indie DB

The game may not work the first time. Read the troubleshoot file for instructions to make it work.

Let There Be Water!

 
 This is what the water in the next physigons will look like. Instead of being on a floating box like the last game, you will be on a realistic island. This is a *performance* water shader which I made almost entirely myself. It is not particularly realistic because it doesn't have refraction or dynamic reflection. Yes, there is giant grass under the water, I haven't replaced the texture yet.

While working on this I also invented a new way of making skies. You see, most games use either a skybox or a skydome to make the background. The problem with skyboxes is that the textures are hard to make as they must be "projected" onto the box or else it will stretch. The problem with skydomes is that the top of the sphere has to use triangles rather than quadrilaterals, and the triangles can't be properly texture mapped so the top of the skydome will look weird unless the texture is modified to account for it. What I invented is a method where it calculates the angles between the camera and sky-pixel then samples from the spheremap using the angles as uv-coordinates. The advantage of this is that the sky textures are easy to make, it fixes the sphere-triangle problem, and no stretching whatsoever should occur if, for example, a low-poly skydome (or even box) is used.

Achievement Unlocked

Game development officially started.
Over the past two weeks or whatever, I've been working on the main menu (which is very nice looking). I'd like to upload screenshots, except no one cares about the main menu. But this screenshot is the first official screenshot of the game running. What is it? Just a test of an early skybox. It took 1,800 lines to get here though.

Pretty epic, huh? No? shut up. Btw the shadow mapping things below are from a mini program I made to test the shader, not the official game.
 

NEXT GEN SHADOW SYSTEM! (april 2013)

I have created a FULLY DYNAMIC shadow system for the next Physigons. It uses a new technique I invented to simulate a "cloudy day" atmosphere.

In the next screenshot you can see how the shadows fade away as they get farther from a surface!

This torus looked so fine I left it at 1080p.

Much better then those horribly glitchy and unrealistically sharp stencil shadows huh?
This demo program runs at 800fps at 1080p on my GTX670 based pc, so hopefully it will run well in the final game.

With 500 cubes, fps is ~100:

With 2000 cubes, fps is 20-25. In this shot you can see how well the dense objects block the ambient light:

Resolution doesn't seem to affect the performance. At 1440p the fps was 22. At 640x400 the fps was... 23. I will of course include an option to disable the shadow system for large simulations/bad computers. With 2000 cubes using a simple hemispherical lighting effect (no shadows), fps was 100. Using hi-poly spheres in place of cubes, fps was almost the same. I think the problem is the overhead when rendering each object, so in Physigons I plan to add an instancing system to reduce this.

In other news, you can see my new logo in the images above. Lol, in the last one I started out using "arial" font and forgot to change it until it was too late. So the new one has a proper font and stuff, and I have also made a really cool "explode" animation for it which I will put in the next video. Also, I figured out why sometimes the old physigons wasn't working, basically due to old vc++ drivers not being found, so I repacked the old physigons with the drivers included. You still need physx system software and directx 9.0c!

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UPDATE - MARCH 2013
I have been doing a lot of thinking about how I want the next version to be, and pretty soon I'll start working on it. I just need to decide which engine to use - DB Pro, Dark GDK, Irrlicht, or possibly directx core. (note: still using DB Pro because it's baws-ome) Anyway, the next version should be a much higher quality game when complete, and I hope to include:
-Textured objects (because vertex colors are lame)
-Soft shadows (maybe SSAO even)
-Highly customizable joints and objects (so you could practically run simulations in it as well as just messing around )
-A terrain editor as well as different maps, maybe weather / time of day
-Modern shaders and effects (motion blur, light scattering)
-No multiplayer, but a built-in interface for sharing worlds and creations online

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UPDATE - DECEMBER 2012
I have not been working on physigons nearly as much as planned, due to school and just getting a gaming PC. Also, the game was originally designed to be just a basic build/destroy game and trying to implement all the joints and electricity and things is a hassle. This is my plan: Scrap everything I have now, start over, use XNA or something rather than Dark Basic, perhaps use bullet instead of PhysX. 

Also, the idea I had where joints are objects and then you glue the joint object to other objects (see video) is not powerful enough (you can't set friction for example). I will probably use a joint system like GMOD where the joint anchors are on the UV coordinates rather than just the center of the object. In my opinion, the best thing about Physigons is the system where physics is off to work, then you turn it on to test/destroy your stuff, then turn it off and the map is reset. I will probably change a lot about Physigons, but I will keep this system.

The current version of Physigons(1.2.1) will be called Physigons "classic", and eventually I will release a "beta" of the new version.

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Any other ideas? Comment below!

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