About the OpenGL ES Coding Challenge

Recall, entries were in the categories of Demos/Fx, Games and Tutorials. In compliance with the contest rules, all entries include source code under open source licenses. The purpose of the contest was to jump-start the creation of a library of open source sample code, tutorials and applications for hardware accelerated OpenGL ES games, and visual fx demos.

- All entries were submitted as open source.
- The entries were from individuals using their own personal development tools and resources (vs a development company)
- Entries came in from all over the world.

The Challenge had a great response with many entries. Winning entries were selected by members of the OpenGL ES working groups in each of three categories and were awarded prizes from 3DLabs, Bitboys, ALT Software, ATI, Gamedev.net, Gameversity, GarageGames, Hybrid, Imagination Technologies, JPR Tech Watch, Nokia, NVIDIA.

About RollerCoaster2005; Demo/Special FX Category

RollerCoaster2005 from Sylvain Trosset is a port of an existing roller coaster simulator to OpenGLES. It has been tested on a Nokia Series 60 phones with Hybrid's OpenGLES implementation. When launched, the program first dynamically generates all the vertices of the track for a few second. Then the animation starts with a first turn around the coaster, a fade in/fade out, and the ride starts...

The port removes all global variables, usage of fixed point type for all coordinates, translation from glBegin/glEnd to glDrawElements/glDrawArrays, a lot of optimizations, and a big code cleanup. In addition, this port was the occasion to add a skydome texture to have a more realistic sky.

The initial goal of this project was to create a rollercoaster ride animation. According to the author, he coudln't bothered designing a nice and detailed rollercoaster track with a modeling tool, so he wrote C code to be able to generate a rollercoaster track from a curve's definition. The first version was available from NeHe's web (http://nehe.gamedev.net/) site in June 2000, but it wasn't possible to completely change the track. Now (16 months later), a parser has been added and it's possible to create new tracks by writing a text file which describes it.

Image Source: RollerCoaster 2000 project page

Some features:
This animation is written in C and uses the OpenGL library.
It's possible to use it with stereoscopic display device.
The rollercoaster track is entirely generated from a curve.
Possibility to create new tracks.
The rails are drawn with multiple levels of detail.

Developers are invited to download RollerCoaster 2005 with Full Source code (780 KB) from
http://www.khronos.org/devu/opengles_challenge/entries/rollercoaster2005.zip

See also:

• http://www.opengl.org/
• http://www.khronos.org/devu/opengles_challenge/
• http://plusplus.free.fr/rollercoaster/
• http://plusplus.free.fr/rollercoaster/download.html