Cauldron v2 · Epic

May 2005 – Nov 2006 · age 23–24

What it was

The demo application of the 2006 Cauldron, and the only place its libraries ever ran. A Win32 and DirectInput host compiled a bank of four shaders, loaded a skinned dwarf and a hillside of SOAR terrain, and walked the scene every frame. The dwarf integrated its own vertical velocity, clamped its fall with a downward raycast, and let a PhysX character controller handle sideways motion and grounding. Its jump and airborne poses were computed straight from frame numbers and distance to the ground. A flock of boids flew overhead, their positions stored as generated scene data. There was a console on the backtick key, sixteen thousand billboard particles updated inside the draw call, and a screenshot routine that smoothed each picture before saving it. The final build was runnable, with mirrors and the skybox commented out.

Wins, for the age

At twenty-four, Jeff got a dwarf to walk, run and jump over cooked terrain with a commercial physics SDK, finding on their own the hybrid-gravity pattern PhysX's own character controller had already shown.
Made a flock of boids part of the scene file, so a flock saved and loaded like geometry.
Wrote update, render, delete and find as free functions over the generated classes: behavior beside the data, not inside it.
Kept the demo runnable to the end. The screenshots were the deliverable, so this ape with a keyboard wrote a smoothing filter for them.

What it taught

Physics integration for a character is controller flags, raycasts, cooked meshes, and one hot-patched keyframe that makes the feet meet the ground.
Pass the real time step. A hard-coded step inside draw made animation and boids run at frame rate.
Update does not belong in render. The note "Refactor Out" above the particle code was the answer, written down.
Load once, and never fix data in code.

Genealogy

Ancestors: Rage: the earlier character-animation demo instinct, now walking on physics. Descendants: Kitchen Demo Game: the next demo that proved the stack, this time a tower defense. Part of: Cauldron v2.

Epitaph

Here lies Epic. A dwarf walked uphill with its own gravity and someone else's collision, under boids that were also scene geometry, and was looked at once more in 2007 and once in 2009.