Project Hoshimi
(3D engine for IC2005 Visual Gaming)

What?

One of the new categories in Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2005 is called "Visual Gaming", where participants are given SDK and have to program AI for a team of nano-robots. This year, the whole "game" behind Visual Gaming is called Project Hoshimi, and it features 3D preview part.

Now, this "3D previewer" is exactly what I (and another member of Nesnausk! team, Paulius Liekis) have made. Why the organizers (Microsoft) had chosen us to do it - I don't really know :)

Most of the 3D previewer was done in Aug-Oct 2004; but there will be some additional tweaks all the way to ImagineCup2005 finals.

Technical details

I did most of programming stuff, and a small amount of artwork. No fancy "effects" are done yet; as the previewer has to run on DX7 (and even some of DX6) video cards. So, a short list:

• Subdivision surface for the level mesh, followed by QEM style simplification.
• Multiple mesh levels of detail (both level and entities).
• All geometry is processed with vertex shaders 1.1; most things use "sort of" rim lighting. Particle effects are also static geometry, with all calculations in vertex shaders.
• Usual stuff: some GUI, some old D3D devices detection, etc.

Download

The 3D previewer is part of ImagineCup2005 Visual Gaming SDK.
Download it from project-hoshimi.com (approx. 3.5MB).

Full source code is released here.

Screenshots

Thumbnails, click for a larger shot.