Introduction

I don't have a clue why you dropped in here. But before you leave, let me explain what these pages are about. I like to call myself a programmer, that means I create programs. These pages are here to tell you about a special project of mine, more spesifically a 3D-engine-like thingy. If you, at this point, have trouble staying awake, you're allowed to leave.

Now, as you've decided to stay, take your time, read all about my engine and mail me your comments and questions. That's the reason I made these pages.

And, of course, a wet kiss to my girlfriend Hilde who provided that beautiful aquarium on the frontpage.

"Disclaimer"

These pages are just a simple explanation of how my engine works. I've never said this is THE way to do things, but I hope some people may find it interesting, and perhaps learn a thing or twenty. This engine is coded to create demonstrations (or "Demos", as we like to call them). Just keep in mind that it was never built to produce any Blastem-All-Far-Out-Of-This-World-3D-games ( BAFOOTW3D(C) ), that's the main reason I don't support any hardware 3D-acc. (And, of course, it would help if I had one.) If any of you actually use this information for something serious, I want to know.

History

The forming of Aquarium started at spring 1996. We had just returned from TG96, were we participated with our first serious demo ever, "Mind over matter". This demo was created without ANY precode planning, I was still coding realmode programs in pure asm, and had totally lost control of the sourcecode. On the way home, I decided to create a system that were a bit more flexible, a system where I could go from one part of the demo to the next one without too much trouble. And of course, convert to protected mode. In general, rewrite the whole thing.

At TG96 a guy gave me this DOS-extender called DOS32. I don't know about the technical side of DOS32, but the userinterface was absolutely brilliant! So for another year I continued coding asm, but with some more planning and 4GB of addressing space to play with. I also advanced from good ol' mode 13h to 16bit hicolor modes. As TG97 was coming up, we had plenty ideas, but no demo. The main reason was that my code sucked rather heavily, as it didn't support perspective texturemapping or subpixel accuracy. In general; the 3d-scenes looked too ugly to be used. After TG97 I was rather tired of coding, but after some time I started to cooperate with a friend of mine, Toe/Deckers Union. We planned parts of the engine together and shared the tasks between us. Unfortunately, it became rather difficult to coordinate our work, as we both made general system changes on our own. We more or less decided to develop the engine individually, and exchange some source and tips if needed. In January 1998, Aquarium was about as finished as a one-man 3D-engine can be. We had only 2.5 months before TG98. 2.5 months of hard work and late nights. Anyway, we managed to finish a great demo called "II" (download from www.tls.no), of which several people stated as "The best norwegian demo ever". After this, I haven't added any special new features to the engine. Some parts have been totally rewritten, i.e. the LWO and LWS converters. Also I coded an archive-system based on ZLib, and made some small structural changes.

Screenshots

I refer to our group The Lost Souls' domain www.tls.no, and our latest demo "III" for screenshots.

News and updates

03. May 1999	Well, we've returned from The Gathering '99 with quite nice results. We won the fastintrocompo with Cucumber Slumber, and came 2nd with our non-accelerated PC-demo called III - live tomorrow. I won't be updating this page much the next two/three months as I'm 1) going to rebuild the engine with win32-support. 2) going away for the summer feeding fish.
16. March 1999	And suddenly, some time went by. I added a "Fade Off Screen" function to the lensflares, that means lensflares may fade as they move towards the edge of the screen. It's also possible to set up a "Camera<->Light-angle"-fadingfunction, the lensflares fade up as you look directly into them. Else we've released a small demo, put together in 10 hours. Go download it from www.tls.no. WATCH OUT FOR OUR NEXT DEMO, COMING SOON! (The Gathering '99)
February, 1999	I replaced MIDAS soundsystem with Niklas Beisert's Indoor Music System, and this one is REALLY brilliant! I'm dead tired of players that return different timevalues on different soundcards, but IMS is PERFECT! I just love it! AND (!) it actually plays Impulse Tracker files 100% correctly!
27. January 1999	Finished the lensflare support. Well, let's say "lensflare". A map may be linked to a nullobject/light and is rendered with additive transparency. Also support for "Fade-Behind-Object" function. Added support for the camera's "Zoom Factor" with envelope.
20. January 1999	Implemented additive transparency. The additive-button may be set in Lightwave to get additive transparency. Also added some lensflare support. Not entirely finished.
11. January 1999	Rewrote all my renderers from 16 bit to 32 bit colours. My flares didn't end up very nice with 16 bits of colours, and I was dead tired of masking out those bits. Anyway, seems like it runs a bit slower, but better than I thought.
4. January 1999	Implemented transparent textures with n% transparency. Also available with environmentmaps.
14. December 1998	Implemented a nice zbuffer trick, check out the ZBuffer section
20. November 1998	Fixed the libs-page with correct links. Sorry forgot it... :)
16. November 1998	These pages are distributed. I won't be coding anything until christmas, cause of exams and other boring stuff. Mail me though.
15. November 1998	These pages are finished.