We Keep Coding

Cloth digitizer! Making 3d models of real Cloths

I have this project of mine that I'm working on. It's for a clothing store, He need all his clothes to be available as 3d objects on the PC for different purposes later on.
I've been doing some research and I guess the only possible way is to get a model that wear each cloth, she stands on a board that will rotate in one way and a camera will.be taking shots at different angles.
I might be complicating stuffs but I need to know if there exist any other techniques for achieving this.
I don't mind any idea even if it requires electronics. Some hints will be helpful.

I think what you are searching for is a program called reconstructMe
here's the link.
what you need is a Kinect.
some other programs are also possible simple google search
I hope this helps!
edit:
if you want to do thing yourself, you might want to take a look at point-cloud-library here. It does require some C++ coding, I am working on a C# version though, so for more info on the wrapping you can msg me.

Open source 3D Geometry libraries?

I'm working on a personal project that involves finding the intersections of tubes (thin walled cylinders). It requires two main math computations I'm trying to find in a library or in sample code.
1) The minimum distance between two lines. (I've found code for this already)
2) The two corresponding points on the two lines that are each closest to the other line.
I've found plenty of sites with the math on how to do #2, but no sample code of anyone implementing it.
I am fully capable of writing this from scratch based on the math, but I'd much prefer saving several hours of coding, testing, and verifying by finding existing code I can incorporate in my C# app. Even if the sample is in another language, I can port things over to C# much faster than writing from scratch.
Since this is very much a "solved problem," I assume there has to be an open source library in some language already in existence, and re-inventing the wheel (and testing it and verifying it) would be a waste of time. (And, as we all know, any time we can spare from life for "personal projects" is a scarce and valuable commodity.)

There many open source library, if you familiar width javascript, you can try three.js, there is an implementation https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/src/extras/geometries/CylinderGeometry.js
or you can find some ascriptscript library, like papervision3d
http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/as3/trunk/src/org/papervision3d/objects/primitives/Cylinder.as

Game engine development question [closed]

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center.
Closed 10 years ago.
I am thinking of making a simple game engine for my course final year project. I want it to be modular and expandable so that I can add new parts if I have time. For example I would make a graphics engine that would be completely independent of the other systems, once that was finished I could add a physics engine etc.
I would also want to make a tool set to go with this engine. For the tools I would like to use C# but I am not sure about the libraries. My question is, if I want a C# GUI program, can I reference a library written in C++? Also would there be any performance problems etc. if I made some of the libraries in C# but wanted to use them from a C++ game.
I would like to avoid C++ as much as possible, my experiences have shown that development time can be a lot higher for a project over that of using C# or Java etc. My graphics development would be in OpenGL, this is all I have been taught. We have only done this in C++ but I have seen that projects such as SharpGL allow for the development with C#. Is there any performance issues with this. I am not looking for a blindingly fast, top graphics game. It will most likely be something simple to show my engine working. My engine probably won't be that great either as I only have a year and am working on my own.
Any advice on this would be appreciated. I am still really in the planning stages so it wouldn't be too much work to completely change what I want to do. I would just like to preempt any major problems I might have.
Thanks

If you can pull this off even under a relaxed set of goals, you're set for a great project. First, you need to get a grasp of scope:
How long do you have to work on the project?
How many people are working on the project?
If you can only create one "piece of the pie" on your own, which one would you pick? Use this to establish a working plan to make sure if you don't get as far as you'd like, you still have enough to make the work show as a great project.
A game engine is a big development task. A game engine with a toolchain is an enormous development task. In a lot of ways, choosing a smaller but more challenging task is preferable because it shows higher-level thinking about problem solving, which is greatly preferred by academics - double that if you are CS and not [Area of] Engineering. Since you are working in managed languages, things you may want to consider are:
Expressing gameplay logic (rules of the game) in a clean manner so as to provide an efficient and reliable path from designer->developer->tester. If you want, this could absolutely include the manner in which you describe the rules (Custom editor? Code API? DSL?)
Game AI has no shortage of extremely challenging problems.
Physics and graphics are interesting and I believe managed languages will eventually be used in these areas, but you may find yourself a bit more limited in your ability to solve these problems. If I were going to work in this area now, I would be trying to answer: "If I could use a managed language for writing [graphics|physics] code without hurting performance, what kinds of [language|runtime] features make the most difference in improving the expressiveness, correctness, maintainability, and reliability of the resulting programs." This goes way past simply having garbage collection and pointer safety.

You should look into XNA. It performs quite well, and from what I've heard, is quite easy to work with.
About referencing C++ code from C#: It's perfectly doable, though it will take some effort from your side to get it right. C++/CLI can work as an intermediate wrapper or you can use P/Invoke. Just remember that C++ is unmanaged and that you will need to do some manual garbage collection, which can be somewhat icky in a managed environment like .Net. Perfomance in the C++ -> C# bridge is okayish, but I'm unsure how it will perform if you need do 100.000 calls to a math-library each second. I guess a small test would be good.. I'll see if I get time to do this later today, though I somewhat doubt it :)

When creating a graphics engine (I'll only really speak about graphics as that is my area of expertise), these are a few of the choices you need to make EARLY in the project:
1) Is it an indoor and/or outdoor engine?
2) What sort of visibility system are you going to use?
3) Forward or deferred renderer?
4) How will you have animation hierarchies?
5) Dynamic or static lighting?
6) How are you going to handle transparency?
7) How will you handle a 2D overlay?
8) What mesh formats will you use? Roll your own?
Bear in mind you need a GOOD solid vector/matrix library and preferably a full maths library that will help with things from eulers to quaternions to axis-aligned bounding boxes.
Do a lot of research as well. Try to find out what the potential problems you are going to face are. Remember things like changing a texture or a shader can have HUGE impacts on your pipelining. You need to minimise these as much as possible.
Bear in mind that getting a rotating bump mapped mesh on the screen is simple by comparison to getting an engine running. Don't let this put you off. It should be no problem to write a fairly simple game rendering engine in a matter of months :)
Also ... find communities specific to this area. You will get a lot of good (though non-OpenGL-centric) information off DirectXDev. There is a fair bit of general game development algorithm information available at GDAlgorithms. There is also an OpenGL specific mailing list here.
Its worth noting that DirectXDev and GDAlgorithms, at least (I don't know so much on the GL mailing list) are populated by some VERY experienced 3D engine and game developers. Don't post up lots of "beginner" questions as this does tend to breed contempt among the members. Though the odd query or 2 at whatever level (beginner to advanced) will get amazing answers.
Good luck! I wish I'd had the chance to do this at University. I might not have gone off and joined the games industry and enjoyed an extra year of sleeping late ;) hehehe

Why do you need any C++ code?
There are already several wrapper libraries exposing OpenGL or DirectX to .NET, such as SlimDX (which, as the name implies, is a much thinner, more light-weight wrapper than something like XNA)
If you're more comfortable with C#, there's no reason why you couldn't write your entire game in that.
Performance generally won't be a problem. In most cases, the performance of C# code is comparable to C++. Sometimes it's faster, sometimes it's slower. But there are few cases where C# isn't fast enough. (However, there is a significant performance cost to interfacing between native and .NET code -- so doing that too often will hurt performance -- so the trick is, if you use native code at all, to have sufficiently big native operations, so the jump to/from .NET isn't done too often)
Apart from that, a word of advice: Don't bother writing an "engine".
You'll be wasting your time producing a big monolithic chunk of code which, ultimately, doesn't work, because it was never tested against the requirements of an actual game, only what you thought your future game would need.
If you want to experiment with game development, make a game. And then, by all means, refactor it and clean it up and try to extract reusable parts of the code. But if the code hasn't already been used in a game, you won't be able to use it to build a game in the future either.
The engines used in commercial games are just this, code extracted from previous games, code which has been tested, and which works.
By contrast, hobbyist engines pretty much always end up taking 2+ years of the developer's time, without ever offering anything usable.
The whole concept of a "game engine" is flawed. In every other field of software development, you'd frown at the idea of one vaguely-defined component doing basically "everything I need to make my product". You'd be especially suspicious of the idea that it is a separate entity that can be developed separate from the actual product it's supposed to support.
Only in game development, which is by and large stuck in 80's methodologies, is it a common approach. Even though it doesn't actually work.
If this is a school project, I'm sure whoever is supposed to grade it will appreciate it if you apply common good software practices to the field. Just because many newcomers to game development don't do that (and prefer to stick to some kind of myth about "engines"), there's no reason why you shouldn't do better.

Make sure your scope is feasible.
As a teenager I went through the build-my-own-engine phase, a few years later I realized I would have gotten a whole lot more done if I had just used pygame and pyopengl and not wasted the effort.
Check out the forums at gamedev.net.

Sounds to me like you have a pretty good plan for your project. (I get your point about XNA in your comment to #Meeh)
You can interop with C++ via P/Invoke directly or COM, you could also I guess come up with some SOA way of doing it, but to be honest as yucky as this sounds I would be inclined to target COM as your API lever of choice...why? because then you open up your API to a lot of common client language's not just C# and VB.NET you will also get Delphi, VBA, Powerbuilder etc.
Performance should not be a problem as the API entry points are just to kick of the work and transport data structures, the real work is done in your library in native code, so don't worry too much about the perf. ATL will be your friend with creating COM Classes that provide entry to your Library.

Whilst it's certainly do-able to bridge between C++ and C# (Via managed C++ is a good way to go if the interface is complex, P/Invoke for a very simple one), for tool<->engine communication I might suggest instead a network based interface. This is ideal for a high-ish level interface, such as you might want for a level editor/model viewer or such. An actual object modeller is not such a good target. What tools do you envision?
If you do it this way you gain the ability to connect to remote instances of the engine, or multiple instances, or even instances running on different hardware platforms. It'll also teach you a bit about sockets if you don't know them already.

Calculate forces on a box

Story: I am developing a construction tool for wooden boxes. A box consists of a set of boards, each board is represented as 3 3D-vectors, and one placement vector. Each box is visualized using OpenGL.
Now, these boxes will be moved around with forklifts, which will apply some forces on them. I would like to calculate the forces on each board in the box, such that I can see if a given construction is stronger than another, if any board is stressed too much etc.
How should I attack this problem? Are there libraries available I can use? Which books should I read to guide me on this? Can I use existing CAD tools to do the physics experiments?
I am using C# to compute everything, but this is not a requirement (though it would be nice).
Edit: What about libraries such as ODE and Bullet? Won't they be able to answer my question?

Before you can implement any computational devices here, you need some modelling. The problem of forces and stresses over a problem like this, with changing set-ups is a very complex one. What you do in Civil Engineering normally is modelling the building (or in this case the box) and use a finite element program to calculate stresses and forces. You need to make assumptions regarding the resistance of the materials.
In short, get a Civil Engineer or someone very knowledgeable in material physics to help you.

I second tekBlues' answer; you need a real civil engineer to work with on this. In particular, ODE and Bullet cannot help you. Both are designed around the physics simulation needs of video games: simulating the movement of unbreakable rigid bodies composed of primitive shapes very quickly. How they do this is only vaguely related to the workings of Newtonian mechanics. In particular, they don't keep track of forces propagating through a system of objects in any way that's useful to you.
I'm sure software packages exist to do this sort of thing, but I'm not personally familiar with any. Again, you need someone with experience doing engineering simulations.

Personal Project Planning [closed]

Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
I want to design a 2D game idea with C#/XNA. Between school, project inexperience, limited resources, and other things that may cause me to bail on the project I am going to try to plan it out before I jump in:
What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?
How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)?
(Note: this is not the main purpose of my project but would be nice!)
How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?
How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product. What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?
With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?
Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?
I suppose this largely depends on your definition of success. I consider a game project successful if:
It's fun. Enough that I want to play it after I've finished.
I learn something in the process of making it.
I actually complete the project, where complete is defined as having art, audio, and any other assets adequate for the style of game that I'm making.
It works under 'field conditions', rather than simply on my own machine/hardware configuration.
In my case, every project that I've considered successful has been one that I've done some serious planning on and committed to seeing through to completion. That's the biggest step for me to get past. A casual project that is the product of a bored weekend usually won't get finished.
How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)? (Note: this is not the main purpose of my project but would be nice!)
Heh. Haven't managed this yet. But then, that hasn't been a concern of mine enough to do the work required to support it. Someone already mentioned the potential revenue from XBLA for XNA projects, which is a very easy avenue to success if your project is the sort of thing that translates well to the console. I've looked into it, but it isn't really appropriate for my projects so far.
How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?
Pen. And paper. I draw a lot of screenshots as guides and I'll usually have some kind of artistic theme in mind to go along with the gameplay. Rapid prototypes help here too; everything from making mockups of menus and various screens in a drawing program to making some simple interactive stuff in a throwaway project.
Write everything down. I take lots of notes and I've been known to have a laptop with notepad open on it sitting next to my development machine, to save me the trouble of alt-tabbing away from my code to type a quick note on what I'm doing. Some great ideas come out of the process of trying to make other things work and if you don't write it down, it didn't happen.
How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product. What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?
Work iteratively as much as possible. I hate to sound cliche, but the whole agile model works really well for games. Start with that core 'fun' idea you have that inspired you to make a game in the first place and get that working in code. Maybe it's a single mechanic that you want to build puzzles/levels around or maybe it's more of a look/feel that you can capture in a single environment/level/whatever. Either way, if you can get a single example of it working right, it becomes a good check on whether the idea is actually viable and will likely give you some ideas of the different ways it can be implemented. That might seem kind of vague, but more specific advice would depend on any number of other factors (your choice of genre, audience, the specific ideas you have in mind, etc.).
With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?
Peter Molyneux of Lionhead has said that he used to prototype all of his games with ascii art. If they were fun with that limited level of graphics, then they were worth continuing. While you might not be able to get that simple with some genres (and an ascii 3d shooter might be novel for it's own sake...), certainly worrying about finished art, audio, or other assets is something that can be saved for much later. In the end, if the game is fun to play, then getting an artist willing to work with you becomes a lot more trivial. I have, on many occasions, used copyrighted assets during my prototyping phase when I just couldn't stand to look at my own art any longer. Just be sure that you have anything like that replaced before you start distributing your project...
Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?
Not sure exactly what you're thinking about here, but breaking barriers is what writing code is all about really. You're finding creative solutions to interesting problems. The web is a great resource for general knowledge, but in the end, it's your own time and perseverance that will create something interesting.
Best of luck.

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project?
Don't worry about how it will turn out
Do it for fun
Don't plan it
Start small, don't think big
Actually code instead of procrastinating on so or other similar sites

If you want somebody else to use this game, make it non personal. Get somebody else who you can give demos to and get feedback from. Make the game very very simple. Build that first before moving onto something very simple. Then go for simple!
not sure :)
Plan with pen and paper sketches for window layouts and game flow. For look and feel, browse the web for slick looking sites you can take inspiration from.
Use notepad, and write the shortest list of things that need doing to make the simplest working demo. Only work on the things you wrote down otherwise you can get carried away on some detail and end up not producing anything useful.
Art is an important part of a game, and you can't have a finished product without it. How about searching the web for a collaborator who'd be interested in doing it for you.
If your stuck with something in your code, ask for help on StackOverflow! :)

Key aspects: Primarily, something that you are excited about. Make a game that REALLY gets you going, and you'll be motivated by your desire to share the finished product with others -- your end product's quality will probably be improved by your passion, as well.
Profitability: Well, since this is XNA and all, if you release a version on Xbox Live, you will earn 70% of the sales revenue that your game earns. Games can be priced for 200, 400, or 800 points (roughly $2.50-$10).
UI/Usability: For this, I typically go through a lot of playability testing...booting it up, seeing how things "feel," then tweaking things if they just don't feel right. I came across a lot of things that I never really thought about before (fade-ins/fade-outs for menus, repeat rates for keys, and so forth), and play-testing is one of the more effective ways that I've been able to identify issues like that. If you've got friends, you can ask them to give you feedback as well.
Planning Tools: Truthfully, I just make a list of the things that I want to include in the overall game concept, then slowly get more granular as I iron out more and more of the fine details. Certain ideas inevitably change after playtesting may reveal them to not be as fun as you had imagined they would be, of course. I haven't ever seen a huge need for any formal tools for this process, though, but I will give the disclaimer that all of my projects have been fairly small in scope and have not been professional-sized undertakings or anything.
Art: This may not always be an option for you, but I have a few friends online that are gifted with art skills -- I solicited interest, and got some volunteers. I presented the option to earn a cut of whatever royalties may come in, but most of them were happy with an attribution in the credits and a chance to see their work in a game that's playable by people all over the world. Regarding small things (icons, etc), stock/royalty-free art can do the job in certain cases, too, but I wouldn't recommend relying on it.
Breaking Barriers: Not sure what's quite meant by this question, but generally speaking if I've come up against some sort of unforeseen issue (technical/implementation challenge,
gameplay-related, or what-have-you), I'm able to either solve the problem or come up with a suitable work-around if I put my mind to it for long enough. Did you mean something else by this?

Some great thoughts given in these articles:
http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=Tips_for_Completing_an_Independent_Project
http://makeitbigingames.com/2006/06/five-realistic-steps-to-starting-a-game-development-company/
http://makeitbigingames.com/2006/02/five-foundational-steps-to-surviving-as-a-game-developer/

First of all - I know universities don't tend to teach this but you really must do it... get source control going. I would suggest installing TortoiseSvn from here: http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads
With TortoiseSvn (a subversion client) - you can create a repository on your USB Flash Drive and carry it around with you, so you always have a copy of your project files. More importantly you can have more confidence when you make changes - because it keeps a history of the changes you've made. So if you break something, you can revert to the most up to date version on your usb flash drive... or even an earlier version if you wish. It also provides ways of showing differences between file revisions, all from the explorer shell extension.
For a personal project the key thing is to keep motivated. You keep motivated by setting yourself attainable tasks. Aim for something attainable. Always make sure you can build your project. Concentrate on adding new functionality while keeping the old stuff still working rather than building up huge nicely designed framework that might end up going no where. If you write your code well, you can refactor and abstract later after you figured out what game it is you actually want to build.
I would advocate a todo list of some kind... something like the spreadsheet found here on Joels site: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html
If you want to get fancy, I would suggest something like Trac: http://trac.edgewall.org/
Trac is a wiki, to-do / bug list and repository viewer all in one. If you get someone else working with you on a project, collaboration with source control and a shared wiki becomes more useful. It's also good to work with others... you can keep each other motivated.
The Wolf fire blog recently had some interesting design ideas and cited serval sources here: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/02/design-principles-from-tufte/
As for getting money, others have already covered the community games thing.
Art assets - there are a few places to find these. Scout the forums at www.gamedev.net. Def look at this blog here for some excellent art (and game design ideas) http://lostgarden.com/
Others have suggested keeping tools simple - I would agree. The simplier and more accessible things are when it comes to project planning, prototyping and design - the more likely you are to use them. As long as you can communicate with yourself when you revisit something... or other people when collaborating, it's a good tool. Set yourself attainable goals, and get on with it :-)

What are some key aspects you've noticed in a successful personal project? Focus on something that actually works.
How did you (successfully) draw revenue the project (besides asking for donations)? Not directly. However, skills get you a job. Build skills.
How do you plan non-programming aspects like window layouts (UI), flow of game, and look and feel?
Build the inside -- the core data model first. If the data model works, everything else is far simpler.
Build unit tests for the model to be absolutely sure it always works.
Work out "flow" and other control issues based on that model.
Build the GUI later, once you have a solid foundation.
How do you bring an abstract idea of a game and making into a real product? What tools do you use in your sketching and planning?
I do the following.
I use Argo UML for technical UML diagrams.
I write documents with my end-state in mind. What the API will be like. How it will work. As part of writing the documents, I clarify my thinking.
I write code in pieces, with unit tests, and refactor ruthlessly.
With limited resources (artistic talent and money), how do I create some of the art resources I need (besides stock art)? Or should I not worry about that until I have a finished product?
Find an artist who wants to help.
Finally, how do you break barriers in your code (may it be knowledge, time, or perseverance)?
Build the inside -- the core data model first.
Spike elements of the technology separately from the main development. Build separate proofs of concept for each new technology. Do not try to integrate unknown technology into the final product. (Many of my customers try this and it doesn't work.)

Having had an experience with game development in my teenage years what I can suggest is the following:
Make sure you have the story ready, or at least the basic points before you start implementing. Also make sure that you do not change the genre of the game while in dev stage. (yeah, I know, this is stupid, but could happen ;-) )
We actually drew some revenue when we managed to sell the game to a software house, however because we had already spent too much in the dev process, we just broke even (i.e. to little profit). So be careful what you spend beforehand
From what you said, you're still in school, so take advantage of that. There will surely be folk out there with artistic talent, most probably friends of yours. Make a team. That's what we did and it was all the way back in 1993! At that time it was even harder. We introduced our talented friends to 3D-Studio (v3 back then) and some even to computers in general, and believe me, before you knew it they were making brilliant art out of it!
Use pen and paper to create the story boards (even better with the friends mentioned above. Decide on the development approach. I.e. what libraries will you use etc. Read a lot about game dev. Make a plan of the project. Give it your best ;-)
Unlike us back then, you have the web to help you. For whatever problems you have with your code it is easy to look it up. StackOverflow didn't exist back then!
And of course make sure you have fun in the process otherwise it will eat you alive!

What are some key aspects you've
noticed in a successful personal
project?
Just do it!