NvPerfHud crashes horribly every time we try to run it with our game through it. The crashes make little sense, as it is not our executable that is crashing, but csc.exe (C# command line compiler) as well as some other stuff like the windows error reporting mechanism. Other XNA applications work fine however so I knew it had to be something specific to our game. After hours of debugging and talking to some Nvidia guys on their forums, I managed to find out that it was XML deserialization that was causing the culprit. Apparently when C# deserializes an XML file (that we use for settings and particle systems) it creates temporary code in your temporary folder and compiles it to a dll that it then loads to deserialize the XML.

I do however not have a solution for this (yet), we just disabled the component that was loading the XML. This would probably be fixable by precompiling the XML serialization routines, which is possible with some tools (such as Sgen), but they did not work for me due to some weird namespace conflicts, which were a documented limitation of the tools.

Cosmopolis was selected as a finalist for the US Imagine Cup which will be held in Washington DC sometime late April. We’ll get shipped up there for a weekend of who-knows-what. With some luck and a lot of hard work, we’ll hopefully break into the international finals in Poland later that year.

Demo Day* was a huge success an enormous failure at the same time. Huge failure because I somehow managed to book my flight back to Iceland in the morning meaning that I’d miss the entire Demo Day, something I did not realize until 2 days before. I need a personal assistant to book my flights in the future. The Cosmopolis demo however was a huge success from what I’ve heard, the best one there by most people’s accounts. Just wish I had been there.

*Demo Day  is a dedicated day at the end of the semester where people from the game industry come to USC and watch students present the best projects of the semester for almost an entire day.

With that in mind, here is what matters, the videos presented at Demo Day. Keep in mind that these are probably unnecessarily  long, intended for someone to be talking while they are playing. Maybe we’ll put up annotations sometime. The videos are in HD, so fullscreen + HD is recommended.

What I specifically worked on in this is pretty much the programming of everything you see (and don’t see, ie core engine stuff) except the animation system. I wrote all the shaders and pretty much everything graphics related (vegetation, terrain, water, time of day, shadows, particle system, etc), as well as a big part of the gameplay (including network) for both (sub)games.

Cosmopolis: United Nations Millennium Challenge.
This game (or subgame actually) was our Imagine Cup submission, although the graphics have been improved a little bit since our original submission. The premise here is that you play as a United Nations officer trying to build up a war torn nation. The specific gameplay that we implemented was de-mining. You have a mine detector and a map at your disposal and take a part of a collaberative and persistent de-mining efftort, where individual score is kept track of. The mine detector is sound based and and once you have locked down the position of the mine you throw rocks at it to blow it up.

Cosmopolis: WarPipe.
This subgame is compltely different from UNMC and is meant to be used for research purposes in the near future. Right now the gameplay is pretty much just a free for all killfest involving an assault rifle and 3 types of grenades (smoke, flashbang and frag). Teamplay is the #1 thing to add in the next semester.

Cosmopolis: World Tools
This is just a demo of the tools we used to create the Cosmopolis world.

So… yeah! Our team at USC are making a game called Cosmopolis. The gameplay will not be discussed but I’ll try to share some random technical details, both from the past and as they are implemented. Subjects could include for example: Ambient Occlusion, Parallel Split Shadow Maps, 3D Particle Systems, Terrain visualization and Nvidia Nexus experiences.

However, chances are that I will fail miserably like 95% of other “blo**” (I despite that word), so come back often to laugh in my face when I don’t post anything! :)