iRiO studios

Its been a lousy winter, but spring is finally happening. Lots of stuff is going on – together with absolutely nothing. Here are some highlights from this winter / spring, current projects and plans for the future.

January and February hit me really hard with a %)#/% flu, together with traveling no less than 3 times to La Palma and one week in Bologna. In addition, the motivation for working with astrophysics plummeted to a new low in Feb/March, since the work environment at my institute tends to be … not quite adequate. Being a social fellow, I thrive in environments with motivated people – preferably who understand and appreciate the stuff that I’m doing. But working with graphics in an astrophysical content can be quite hard, since I virtually have nobody to talk to, and end up skipping down paths of distraction – mostly Android graphics development.

I currently have 7 months left of my post-doc, and I’m seriously contemplating what I should do afterwards. I have 8-10 options ready, but my preferences seem to skitter from one possibility to something completely different, depending on daily experiences. But I guess this is a quite normal side effect from being a single educated rich white bastard, life is just too full of possibilities. We therefore tend to end up as paralyzed rabbits, staring straight into the headlights of wealth and freedom. But things are loosening, and here are some cool stuff:

The GAMER paper is being submitted before may, and we’re finally performing the last touch. We hope it will be accepted without too much trouble, but it’s quite a long shot.

I’ve spent like 5.3E123 hours developing an Android OpenGL 2.0 ES framework while creating Navy Seal Clubbers. The cool thing about the library (nicked “JPenguin”) is that it supports OpenGL ES 2.0 with all its marvelous shaders, making it possible to create quite nice graphics. The JPenguin library currently contains

• GLSL shaders
• Fully customizable GUI with boxes, buttons, panels, listboxes, toggle buttons, slidebars and truetype fonts
• Basic container for 3D objects, boid movements, physics
• Entities that support JBox2D objects (used in NSC)
• Music & sound library
• 3D objects such as billboards (2D in 3D space), boxes, tetrahedrons, spheres etc, .obj-files etc
• Texture handling, loading & procedural generation (perlin noise, button graphics etc)

NSC is about 75% finished, but my collaborators seem to keep producing kids instead of graphics for the game, so until they have spare time I decided to start on a new project – 8-bit defender rewritten in 3D (using JPenguin). Some screenshots (seen through a “old-skool-TV-shader”:

This game will be 100% procedurally generated, with an infinite perlin-fractal landscape colored by the GPU. The goal of the game is not yet decided, the player is currently able to navigate a blue tetrahedron followed by its (boided) green allies around the map, attacking red evil tetrahedrons. I was thinking about allowing for base building and resource gathering, but with minimal & retro graphics. But let’s see where this is going.

I haven’t found the inspiration to work on the planet renderer this spring, but I have been contacted by several people who might be interested in this project – or perhaps even go work for a public institution in Chicago. Or I might just stay in Oslo and study spanish and russian. Or more to Helsinki or Jyväskylä and study finnish. Or just start up an indie game company. Or just continue with another post-doc, either in Norway or the Canaries or whatever. Or I could make a decent living by acting the fool when I’m around my ex. Or perhaps I’ll sell my apartment, embark on a sailing boat and write a book. There are infinite possibilities, but I happen to be a lazy single educated rich white bastard.

So. Since I returned to Norway last september, I dedicated my life to actual science instead of fluffing about with the planet renderer. However, I will continue with this when I have more time.

This autumn I converted my old galaxy-simulation code into a full-fledged ray-tracer. Check out gamer.irio.co.uk for screenshots, code and the upcoming paper for GAMER: Galaxy Morphology Easy Ray-tracer.

Naturally, I am using Perlin noise to create those sexy physical patterns.

After wrestling with 45 orcs and succumbing to a severe hangover, I finally managed to implement real-time shadows.

You basically generate a hi-res height texture for each quad, and send the (neighboring) multitextures to the ground shader. The ground shader traces a ray from the ground position to the light source through the height field texture – and if it hits something – you have a shadow.

Tricky thing was fixing the tangent-space-transformation bugs, making it MPI & fixing the neighbors. But now the orcs are dead, and I can finally rest.
So this picture contains no shadows

whereas the following picture has

So added a new cloud + atmosphere + ground + model

[Show as slideshow]

The planet code works nicely on my  new mac, except that OS X does not yet support opengl 4.x – no geometry shaders, and therefore no trees yet.

Instead, I decided to implement swiss turbulence - “fake” erosion, in addition to my own take on modifying the perlin noise – combining several landscape types.

Also note the sun rays, new in this version

[Show as slideshow]

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New android project

check out the project homepage for downloads and update

Make sure you watch in HD:

Ok. Lazy me started coding again on my real-time planet renderer. What’s new:

- Semi-ray-traced clouds with proper lighting
- Fixed serious atmosphere bug
- Fixed water – now proper trochoids & fresnel
- Cloud system on planet
- Background space shader for stars / galaxy (real-time)
- Lots of bugfixes

[Show as slideshow]

Background galaxies with realistic light intensities, noise functions and spirals. Noise properties from the Nordic Optical Telescope are added. Fun to do. However…

One of the images below is a real picture taken at the NOT, the other is a simulation made by me. Which is which?

In January I started a position as a post-doc in cosmology at the University of Oslo. Due to this, I haven’t had time to code on My Little Planet, but hopefully I’ll start writing an live-background My Little Planet android-app soon

In any case, here is a picture of a simulated gravitational lens: simulated background galaxies are lensed through a foreground cluster, convolution & noise added. Neeerdy stuff, but fun to do =)