SpaceRocks was my personal project. It was a way for me to learn WorldToolKit and morphed into a useful demo that showcased many WTK features. As new features were added, like DirectX support or specialized sound, I would incorporate them into SpaceRocks.
Much like Rover and Sailing, it was ported to virtually every platform supported by WTK, from SGI Reality Engines, to Sun workstations to the latest PC board from 3DLabs.
SpaceRock was an homage to the classic game Asteriods taken to the next level with textures from real asteroids and deep space objects from the Hubble Space Telescope.
As time went on, I added additional features. In the image above, I used the ability to layer on a 2D image representing a cockpit viewport.
Years ago, I built a website for SpaceRocks on my personal website:
https://paynecentral.com/tompayne_old/rocks.htm
The original README file includes a bunch of notes on the features I added over time as some background on the app. This little application showcased a long list of technologies:
- Real-time 3D graphics
- Utilizes hardware acceleration
- Hierarchical Scene Graph
- Transparency
- Animated textures
- Dynamic material definition
- Switch Nodes
- Collision detection
- Selectable texture filtering
- Multiple rendering modes
- Spatialized 3D sound
- Cross Platform (WinNT/Win95/SGI/Sun/DEC)
- Performance independant motion
- Cascading Menus
- Dialog Boxes (cross platform)
- Performance monitor
- Object Oriented design
- Per Object Data
- 2D/3D text
- 3D points
- 2D/3D lines
- User (re)defined sensor model (ie myMouse)
- Stereo viewing options
- Support for multiple sound devices
- Support for popular VR peripherals
- Models modifiable at runtime
- Reads VRML files across the internet
- Sensors modifiable at runtime
- Sound modifiable at runtime
- Special Effects
- Network enabled (coming soon)
- Multiple simultaneous viewpoints
- Dynamic window creation
- Polygon-level manipulation
SpaceRockVR 2020
With the release of the Oculus Quest 2 headset in 2020 and the availability of Unity, I decided to re-envision SpaceRocks. While it doesn’t really look anything like the original, it captures many of the same ideas.
And yes, this version includes a handheld llama that fires asteroid killing energy balls.
SpaceRocksVR also has its own blog post on my personal site:
https://paynecentral.com/tompayne/2021/12/04/spacerocks-lives/