KeyEngine - 3d Game Engine

Hobby DirectX11 C++ 3d game engine, with ambitions of evolving into a full fledged game engine in 98.13 billion years.

Components

Graphics : Direct3d11
Instanced rendering : custom
Diffuse, Specular normal workflow
PBR workflow : UE4's Metallic/Roughness - Base color, Roughness, Metallic maps
Decals : custom
Input : WinAPI & RAWInput, custom gamepad input
Physics : Bullet
Configuration files : inih, custom
Scripting : PyBind11

"KeyC0de Productions" intro sequence

If you've seen some of my YouTube videos you may have noticed the 12 sec intro sequence that rolls first thing.

I made this mainly using 3d Studio Max 2015 and Adobe After Effects.

To say it was tough would be an understatement, as I'm not really a modeler, animator. I just loved 3d Studio max and years ago I got the student license which allowed me to play and tinker with it to my heart's content. Same goes with After Effects, although the After Effects aspect was much simpler, required less work and after watching a few YouTube tutorials I was set.

I drew inspiration from various intros I adore such as:

• Audio Visual Enterprises (1993)
• Prism Entertainment (80s)
• Gun Media (which is basically a carbon copy of Vidmark Entertainment 88)
• Zodiac video (from 1985)
• WWE Monday Night 1985
• 20-20 vision (90s)

The music tune you will hear being played is a free sound from 

Aspect Oriented Programming

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding additional behavior to existing code without modifying the code itself, instead separately specifying which code is modified via a 'pointcut' specification, such as “log all function calls when the function's name begins with 'set'”. This allows secondary behaviors (eg logging) to be added to a program without cluttering the meaty code that's core to the functionality.

Design

• The AspectConfiguration specifies which aspect applies to which method of an object
• Each aspect is essentially a method (or a separate class containing a group of those aspect-methods) written in an aspect-oriented language (or annotation, or through an idiom in an existing language).
• Aspects are wrapped 'before', 'after' or 'around' methods. For example we...

Thread Pool

A thread pool is a software design pattern that helps programmers achieve concurrency in an optimal way. By maintaining a pool of threads ready to execute at any moment performance is increased since latency is minimized by keeping a set of threads always available; at the ready, instead of frequently starting them up and destroying them because of frequent brief tasks. Thus we avoid short lived threads which break concurrency.

All this because creating and destroying threads takes a longer time than keeping them constantly alive and waiting.

It stands to reason for me to want to make a thread pool to test my understanding of various modern C++ features and multithreading, as well as have it adorn various other projects that could certainly benefit from its features.

Design

• there is an array of threads - m_pool
• there is a FIFO queue of tasks (a Task should be a...

Event Queue, Message Bus and Dispatcher

NOTE: I will use the terms event and message interchangeably. In some contexts there may be a minor differentiation but for this discussion it will be ignored.

Event Queue or Message Bus

Definition:

Decouple when a message or event is sent from when it is processed. - R. Nystrom

What's the easiest way to manage the connections between event listeners and event producers? You guessed it “Event Queues”.

When an event occurs, such as user input, or an entity sending an event to another entity, it needs to be stored somewhere such that it's not lost while in transit between the source that reported the event and when the program gets around to respond to it. That “somewhere” is a queue.

New events are added to a queue of unprocessed events. And at a later time when it's convenient in the application we pull off the events from the...

Windows Console on a GUI Application

Provision Windows C++ GUI applications, with a console that you can use for logging or whatever other purpose you deem useful.

I used Windows 8.1 x86_64, Visual Studio 2017, C++17 to build the project.

Github

Github repository link.

C++ Timing

A Timer that I plan to use in a lot of projects.

Bonus: Performance log - as an extension of the Timer, which is actually an array of pair<timestamp,stringLabel> and has many uses.

Plenty of test cases to test thy mettle.

I used Windows 8.1 x86_64, Visual Studio 2017, Modern C++17 to build the project. It should work on other platforms as well.

Github

Github repository link.

Quadcopter Drone CC3200 Radio Telemetry Project

This was my Electronics Engineering Bachelor Thesis Project (2015).

Nikos Lazaridis, Technical University of Piraeus, Greece.

Texas Instruments (T.I.) CC3200 wifi unit, acting as the telemetry intermediate between the Ground Control Station (GCS) and the APM Ardupilot flight controller on top of the QuadCopter/Drone.

The thesis is written in Greek. You can find it in Thesis_QuadcopterTelemetry_Nikos_Lazaridis_ppapag.pdf. If I get requests I may get motivated to translate it to English.

Most of the code has been written in Texas Instruments Code Composer Studio 6. I haven't tested it with updated CCS versions.

Showcase

Youtube video link.

Github

Github repository link.

C++ Vector Implementation

A C++14/17 ready allocator_traits aware Vector similar to std::vector I made to familiarize myself with the internals of containers and specifically std::vector.

TODO:

• fix some Iterator problems (perhaps add begin() and end() to it)
• shrinkToFit(#) : if current storage is larger than # Bytes, it shrinks it to # bytes
• halfSize() shrink

I won't attempt to create a full tutorial on this, because others have done it better (check out acknowledgements section below). But the code is very well commented so you can read for yourself. If you're overwhelmed with templated code check out this tutorial: link.

I used Windows 8.1 x86_64, Visual Studio 2017, C++17 to build the project.

Contribute

Please submit any bugs you...

Neural Network Demo

Following a great tutorial from YouTube by Dave Miller : “Neural Net implementation in C++”. Nothing more to be said other than watch his tutorial. It was the best intro on Neural Networks I have ever seen. I present it here with source code in case anybody wants to save a bit of time or double check with my version.

I used Windows 8.1 x86_64, Visual Studio 2017, C++17 to build the project.

Github

Github repository link.

Acknowledgements

All credits go to Dave Miller's excellent introduction to Neural Networks. I simply implemented his example as I was following along.