Razor engine WIP

[headkaze]

Since the cat is kinda out of the bag already and everyone seems to be making WIP posts about their new engines I thought I would officially announce another one!

I started working on this about a year and a half ago and have been side tracked from it with other projects over the past year. So a few weeks ago I finally got back to the point where I could put some time back into it.

I was going to wait until I had a demo to show people but it seems that everyone else is posting about their WIP so I thought I would too. To be honest I don't even know if this will become a stand-alone FE. I have been talking to Tom Speirs (author of GameEx) about implementing the engine in a future version of GameEx. It's possible it could become something of that nature but I'm not sure. My original intention for this system is for some commerical products I've been meaning to write but I don't see why it couldn't be used as an arcade FE engine as well.

A brief list of features are Flash frame/tweening based animation system (yes nothing new anymore I know!) with easing effects (Linear, Quad, Cubic, Quart, Quint, Sine, Expo, Circ, Elastic, Back, Bounce), full 3d space for all objects even 2d, 3d models, events, scripting (in C#), reflections, FX (Shaders), frame based animation (like sprite sheets), 3d accellerated video, screen rotation/split screen, textured fonts, 3d text. Probably more that I can't remember right now.

Sorry I have not got a decent theme or video to show you the power of the engine yet. It has a very simple skin I threw together for testing but I thought I better show some screenshots (as they say "screenshots or it didn't happen")

[headkaze]

Okay I managed to put a small video together . Nothing spectacular I know.

[BadBoyBill]

Very cool, looks very fast. Looks to be a good year for new FE's.  Love the split screen cocktail, I had it in my previous AS2 Version, but I dont think I'll be able to add it with this version.  Is that like a transparent video or animation overlay from your recording?  Looks neat.

[headkaze]

Very cool, looks very fast. Looks to be a good year for new FE's.  Love the split screen cocktail, I had it in my previous AS2 Version, but I dont think I'll be able to add it with this version.  Is that like a transparent video or animation overlay from your recording?  Looks neat.

If you mean the strange green stripes moving around the screen they are there because the whole skin is actually inside a giant spinning sphere with a texture. That was just another test object.

[BadBoyBill]

Thats very cool.  One of the reasons I made premade animations was because I though people might get overwhelmed or confused whith "EaseOutQuint", EaseInOutExpo" and things like that.  But then again including all the possible transitions will give advance users more precise control over their animation.

[headkaze]

Thats very cool.  One of the reasons I made premade animations was because I though people might get overwhelmed or confused whith "EaseOutQuint", EaseInOutExpo" and things like that.  But then again including all the possible transitions will give advance users more precise control over their animation.

Actually your idea has inspired me to include some of what Cakemeister called "canned" animations as I like the idea of putting common movements into simpler commands. And I mean judging by what you've done in HyperSpin it's already powerful enough for what most people would use it for.

A good reason to have both though is, for example, having a space invader sprite character moving around the screen in some sort of complex path and looped over (maybe with some sort of random element). So yeah, I think both ways works well, but in the end I think the "canned" animations will be easier for people to use and therefore probably more useful.

[Lilwolf]

Looks cool! 

Planning on sending out code? 

I wrote a 3d frontend years and years ago that came close to being great...  it was in java using an opengl wrapper.  I had a floating machine where the screen rotated left or right to get to the next game, then if you hit random, it would break in 3 and spin like a jukebox stopping at the new game.  plus there where a set number of cubes floating around the base that had screenshots of the next / prev games.  Then these would fluidly spin around.  It worked GREAT... until I moved it onto my arcade machine which had an ATI video card and I got 2 fps .... I got pissed and dropped the project.

Anyway, I've been working in C# recently and might be interested in seeing if I could add some of the features into your engine.  Let me know.

[headkaze]

Looks cool! 

Planning on sending out code? 

I wrote a 3d frontend years and years ago that came close to being great...  it was in java using an opengl wrapper.  I had a floating machine where the screen rotated left or right to get to the next game, then if you hit random, it would break in 3 and spin like a jukebox stopping at the new game.  plus there where a set number of cubes floating around the base that had screenshots of the next / prev games.  Then these would fluidly spin around.  It worked GREAT... until I moved it onto my arcade machine which had an ATI video card and I got 2 fps .... I got pissed and dropped the project.

Anyway, I've been working in C# recently and might be interested in seeing if I could add some of the features into your engine.  Let me know.

The only problem is I may be using my engine for commercial products in the future, so I'm not sure about that. Unless you have no problem with that. 2 fps doesn't sound too promising though.

My current animation engine is pretty powerful and can be applied to any graphical object from a 3d model to a video. Maybe you could get fraps and make a video of your idea and I'll see if I can figure out how to do it.

[Cakemeister]

I had a floating machine where the screen rotated left or right to get to the next game, then if you hit random, it would break in 3 and spin like a jukebox stopping at the new game.  plus there where a set number of cubes floating around the base that had screenshots of the next / prev games.  Then these would fluidly spin around.  It worked GREAT... until I moved it onto my arcade machine which had an ATI video card and I got 2 fps .... I got pissed and dropped the project.

That is a cool idea for a skin.

[headkaze]

Hmm any chance a moderator can trim the "clevland steamer" posts from this thread? Kinda off topic saint's note -- done!

Anyway Razor is not a dead project! I have been working on it on and off. Since the only graphic artists to come out of the woodwork seem to be working on HyperSpin skins I've had to delve into some of my own graphics hunting. I have a new found respect for BadBoyBill's effort in collecting artwork, it's quite a friggen chore! I have 38 layouts in the same vein as the videos below but haven't had time to xml them all yet since there is no theme editor. I am using Photoshop and hand eye coordination to create them. Not all that hard really just takes time like everything else.

Anyway some videos of WIP, still haven't implemented things like transitions but it's getting there. I chose to do some Ultrastyle type layouts since people seem interested in the colorful graphics. I guess it's because they are kinda like the attract modes for arcade machines.





Fraps does incur quite a heavy FPS hit, and I was capturing at 1280x1024, so the animation is much smoother in RL.

[BadBoyBill]

Very impressive headkaze!  Lovin the particle effects and screen flipping.  I hope to see this one go far with lots of eye catching effects that I believe an FE should have. Good luck and would love to try it out someday. 

[brian_hoffman]

Those vids are looking pretty nice
Should be pretty sweet.

[headkaze]

Time for another video!



Things of note:

- Partical effects
- Animated objects
- Flash animation (those swirling stars are infact a Flash animation / swf file) you can use like any other object
- Frame based animations (joystick and button examples)
- Background video
- Text effects; there will be lots of bult in effects to make your text fly around the screen
- At the end you will see Razors built in layout editor. You can move objects around and save your new layout inside the frontend.

[SGT]

Looks excellent.  What are the hardware specs on the machine that you're running in that last video?

[headkaze]

Looks excellent.  What are the hardware specs on the machine that you're running in that last video?

Good question The video is recording Razor running on a Dual Core E8400 and will run full 70 FPS when not recording using Fraps. Thats with VSync on and a 70 Hz refresh rate and all the effects you see in the video, so it's running at full speed. I wouldn't run it without VSync as you would get screen tearing. Fraps recording takes quite a performance hit.

I have a notebook which is a P4 3 Ghz with 512 MB RAM and it has a low end video card that shares it's memory with the PC's RAM for most testing and I do lay on alot of effects during testing, but I admit you will need a decent machine to get the most out of Razor. I am obviously trying to optimize it best I can, but I would say minimium requirements for the default theme will be around P4 2.6 512 MB of RAM. And that is being generous because as soon as you layer a background video and flash animation your taking another 10 FPS hit each element. For simple layouts like most other current FE's it will be okay on a lower spec machine, but then I would just say use GameEx, Mala or Atomic if you have a low spec machine. This FE is being written for next gen PC's and like I said I am trying to optimize best I can but using MDX (Managed Direct X) already takes about a 10% performance hit and using flexible xml layouts means optimization can be difficult. People arn't going to create layouts thinking about optimizing texture RAM, vertex buffers or anything like that, so yeah it just means a decent machine will be necessary. Sorry to all the cab users out there running P III's!

[Cakemeister]

Is that sky done with a background video or with a shader?

BTW I'll be stealing that rotating logo idea.

[headkaze]

Is that sky done with a background video or with a shader?

BTW I'll be stealing that rotating logo idea.

No there is no demo of using shaders yet, but I do have pixel shaders working in the engine. I just haven't written anything worth showing off yet as writing pixel/vertex shaders are a whole new ballgame. I have a simple one that inverts the colors of a image, but nothing more than that. The background is just a video.

Hehe the rotating logo is just a few frames of animation, nothing special. But your welcome to it

[Cakemeister]

I just haven't written anything worth showing off yet as writing pixel/vertex shaders are a whole new ballgame.

I have a simple one that inverts the colors of a image, but nothing more than that. The background is just a video.

I know what you mean. I found one that does a mandelbrot set and it looks cool but it is too slow for current video cards.

[headkaze]

I know what you mean. I found one that does a mandelbrot set and it looks cool but it is too slow for current video cards.

I definately think pixel shaders will be great to use in our FE's. Like I mentioned before in your Khameleon thread the NVIDIA FX Composer should help creating some cool effects. It is a whole new discipline to learn though and there are whole books written about how to program them. I might actually end up buying a book on it, as I think there is alot of potential to use the GPU for effects.

[Ummon]

Clicking on the link, WMP eventually says there's some kind of unknown error. I downloaded the file, but WMP says codec error when trying to play it. I don't as it worked for someone else.

[RetroBorg]

Looking good, can't wait for more vids.