Fullscreen Textures

We've hit a VERY important milestone in development today. We can now draw fullscreen textures (which are essential to the game, [puzzles, anyone?]). We'll be (hopefully) going 3D from here on out. The engine is a in a VERY good state, and with Alex helping a lot, the code is very efficient and very clean (as well as being non-clunky, which is how it would be if it was left up to me *laughs*).

(Also, we need to take into account widescreen, but that can wait).

Bitmap fonts

We're back!!! I'm finally done with the uni semester and actually have some time to sit down and program some stuff. I've been working on a lot of OpenGL stuff lately (mainly a lot of memory safe backend stuff like VAOs, VBOs etc, though they need some _serious_ revision and fleshing out). As a bit of a side (and to show Alexander how it all fits together) I decided to take a crack at implementing the SILENT HILL bitmap font (with the code generously provided by belek666!) I'm actually surprised by how well it all glues together (besides the OpenGL stuff, but it's good for the most part). Also we only use 1 VBO meaning we save a HEAP of space on the GPU!!!

Swizzling

Very interesting. The reason 8-bit textures are the way they are isn't due to some quasi encryption on KONAMI's part, but rather the way the GS on the PS2 works (by swizzling the textures). More info can be found here. Notice the images on swizzled 8-bit->32-bit textures look IDENTICAL to what happens when you rip the texture from the game and scale it up.

Looks like they really did just rip the assets and make a PC version. Funnily enough the document says that is possible to swizzle in software using C, which we are doing.

Where in the World is Jesse Buhagiar???

Don't worry, I'm not dead and sh3redux is CERTAINLY not dead. For anyone that actually reads the blog (hahaha) I'm currently super busy with uni and it's sucking all my time. I really want to just sit down and program sh3redux, but I have zero time and zero motivation... During the year break (when I started sh3redux) I was working on it for 4+ hours per day everyday, which I just can't do between work, school and life (Read:girls... [don't get me started..]). Alex is also super busy, as he's currently doing his thesis which can be found here!

For anyone eagerly anticipating to play some modern SH3, don't worry. I'll definitely sit down and work on it some more when I've got the time. We definitely need more devs (I'm going to ask Mike to get involved) so we can have a better dev cycle.

Until Next time
Quaker

Textures are done

After a total of 8 days of trial and hardship, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you 8-bit paletted textures!!

Stupidity

I am a victim of my own idiocy. In my rush to try and implement palettes and the 8-bit textures, I neglected to see that the palette needed to be rearranged... Alex has got it done.. Textures work with no noise now and I can finally stop obsessing over 768KiB pieces of shit and get on with my life (and sleep).

Pictures tomorrow.

Updating

So me, having the short attention span that I have (in regards to programming), decided to take a bit of break from sh3redux and work on a small auto-updater that I plan to distribute with my builds of sh3r when it's done.

I'm using wxWidgets for the user interface, and while it's really good, at the same time I hate it because of some of the really weird things, like having a macro for the main function...

Nonetheless, I have a small frame with two buttons that can connect to the Palm Studios github page and send a GET request, though I'm going to have to work out a way to check if the versions are the same. Shouldn't take me too long, and is a pretty fun side project!