Welcome To My Blog

Hi, welcome to my blog. My name is Mark Doorbar and I am a games programmer. I am currently in the final year of my BSc (Hons) Computer Games Programming at Teesside University.

In this blog I will post regular updates about current projects I am working on as well as projects I have completed.

My youtube video channel can be found here http://www.youtube.com/user/wudbugcouk/videos. This is where I will post videos of my work.

If you would like to contact me please don’t hesitate to email me

Thank you.

25/04/2012 – Still going strong

Today is a huge milestone for Stick Parkour. Today the amount of downloads reached 160,000. This is great and I would like to thank everyone who downloaded it. Once I have finished my remaining university projects I will be looking into adding some new features to it. Ideas I’ve had so far are

  • Power-ups e.g. change speed, take more damage, etc…
  • Challenges
  • More achievements
  • Multiple levels

If you have any suggestions please email me at the address above.

 

28/03/2012 – General Update

This post is just a general update of where I’m currently at with all my projects.

  • Final Year Project – Currently timing different tests and saving the results
  • Real-Time Graphics – I have a simple SSAO implementation but it doesn’t look very good. I’m working on improving that and I started to integrate FXAA.
  • Physics – Currently working on getting orientated bounding box collision working. Doing point to plane collision detection for each side of the cube.
  • Games Device – Creating a simple timing class which can be used to easily profile how long functions take to complete. I will combine this with my debug class so the results are printed on screen on the PC and the Caanoo.

The above are all University modules.

  • Personal side project – Currently I am working on a simple game based on the radar system in Metal Gear Solid. I’m writing in in C++ using SDL but am hoping to convert it to iPhone when my modules are over and possible create a 3D version using the Unity for iPhone & Android as I have a free licence. I will post some pictures soon.

09/03/2012 – Presentation

Yesterday was my Advanced games development presentation. In this we showed off out group game “The Amazing Adventures of Pierre Le Guy”. I think it went really well. We previewed our game trailer and then played a short demo of a few of the levels.

Here is the trailer for our game that I made.

Project:

I am currently researching D3D queries for my project to gather accurate timing information. Once I have timing working I will be able to test out my hypothesis and progress further into my investigation of tessellation in Direct3D11.

29/02/2012 – Success

I have managed to get some simple tessellation working in Direct3D 11. I am now working on writing my own algorithm which will be more efficient.

This is 2 triangles which have been tessellated with a factor of 64 which is the maximum amount that is currently supported.

I have also been accepted into Expotees which is an event which will take place in May where I can show off my final year project.

21/02/2012 – Tessellating

I am currently working on the tessellation for my project. I have been looking through a lot of information online about it and am currently working on the hull and domain shaders. These two shaders are new to the Direct3D 11 pipeline and allow you to control what happens with the tessellation.

The group project game is also going well with the levels getting finished off by the artists. We are starting to put the game together now working on the finishing touches like the menu and achievements. The grapple is almost finished it just requires a little tweaking to work with some of the levels.

Final Year Project page updated

I have updated the final year project page. This page can be viewed by clicking on the link in the header.

Quote from Final Year Project Page

What is my final year project?

For my final year project I am investigating real-time tessellation on the GPU using DirectX11. My aim is to compare the difference between loading in the full detail 3D model and loading in a low polygon 3D model and tessellating it on the GPU. If possible I would also like to try other tessellation algorithms and test the difference between them.

What will I be using?

To load help load in the 3D models I will use an API called Assimp.

I will use DirectX11 to render and tessellate the 3D models. This allows me to take advantage of the new pipeline stages it has to offer in relation to tessellation.

What statistics will I measure?

  • Time taken to render one frame
  • Frames per second