It's A Cold Night To Be Out...

Here is a really brief video of what I have been up to. It's the new title screen. It might not seem like much, but a whole heap of work has gone into this under the hood. There's the new deferred rendering, new behaviour tree for AI (a patrol behaviour is driving the dog back & forth), reworked serialization system, and just generally much, much, much cleaner code. It took awhile... but I think it will show its true worth in the future. More updates to come very soon!

If you want, you can download the build too. I have only tested this on like two computers though. ;-)

UPDATED: Changed the video (and download)... now with actual balloons! :)

How-To Embed RSS Feeds

If you ever feel the need to embed an RSS feed in a webpage (like my BitBucket feed on the right), maybe this Javascript snippet will be helpful (just remember to replace the bits marked in red). It uses the Google AJAX Feed API, which is pretty nifty!

<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi/?key=GOOGLE AJAX API KEY" type="text/javascript"></script>

<div id="feedControl"></div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  function loadFeedControl() {
    var feed = new google.feeds.Feed("FEED URL");
    feed.setNumEntries(16);
    feed.includeHistoricalEntries();
    feed.load(function(result) {
      if (result.error) {
          return;
      }

      var container = document.getElementById("feedControl");
      if (!container) {
          return;
      }

      for (var i = 0; i < result.feed.entries.length; i++) {
        var p = document.createElement("p");
        p.innerHTML = result.feed.entries[i].content;
        container.appendChild(p);
      }
    });
  }

  google.load("feeds", "1");
  google.setOnLoadCallback(loadFeedControl);
</script>

Reconstructing View Space Position from Depth in OpenGL ES 2.0

There is a lot of information scattered around the Internet on this (some of which seems wrong). Here is some rough code for my solution to the problem. I only just got this working, so I hope it is correct... you have been warned!

First, I will describe the inputs:

• winPos - Pixel position (from gl_FragCoord.xy).
• winSize - Size of window in pixels.
• depthSample - Raw depth value from the depth texture (should be in the range of [0, 1]).
• nearFar - Distances of the near and far planes.
• u_top, u_right - Top and right limits of the near plane.

For u_top and u_right, I derive it from my vertical field of view angle and aspect ratio (width / height) like so (C++):

    m_top = m_near * Math::tan(0.5f * m_verticalFov);
    m_right = m_top * m_display->aspectRatio();

Given all that, here is the GLSL function that will return the view space position for the given pixel position:

vec3 viewSpacePos(vec2 winPos, vec2 winSize, vec4 depthSample, vec2 nearFar)
{
    vec3 position;

    float depth = depthSample.x;
    position.z = -nearFar.x / (nearFar.y - (depth * (nearFar.y - nearFar.x))) * nearFar.y;

    position.x = (((winPos.x / winSize.x) * 2.0) - 1.0) * u_right;
    position.y = (((winPos.y / winSize.y) * 2.0) - 1.0) * u_top;

    float scale = -position.z / nearFar.x;
    position.x *= scale;
    position.y *= scale;

    return position;
}

Hope this helps someone out there! It might be best you try derive it yourself too, so you can debug it (if you ever need to)... :)

UPDATE: Made small correction to how scale was calculated. Oops!