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Oooh, triangly

Published June 20, 2006
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Hit a big milestone today: the new 3D engine actually draws polygons! Yayy!

Right now, all meshes are untransformed. They are also all quads set to render at 10% of the screen dimensions (both axes). Oh, and they're wireframe, drawn in plain white.


But the scenegraph renders stuff, and that's what matters!


I've got some abstraction and cleanup to do to wrap up some things with the mesh loading (so it'll be ready to read real meshes off disk). One of the other programmers is working on abstrations for materials so we can get texture and shader stuff going again. That pretty much leaves the actual transformation composition code to do, which should go fast... the only trick will be making sure that the camera parameters behave similarly to the old system so that I don't break 99% of our art assets.

I've set myself the personal goal of having all of this ready by the end of Wednesday; Thursday I'll sit down and do a full analysis of remaining features that need to get ported forward - stuff like animation support, lensflare effects, lighting effects, etc. So late Thursday/early Friday I'll know just how screwed we are [grin]


This has been a pretty intense push, and there's still quite a lot to do - but fortunately, since the new code architecture is just so much cleaner than before, porting forward all the functionality should go very fast. My hope is to have the engine back to it's pre-rewrite state (functionality-wise) by the end of the month, which should be possible with a couple other guys working in parallel.

Fortunately, I live for this kind of challenge and pressure, so I'm quite happy at the moment. Of course, I'll probably also be quite happy when I can sit down and relax for a few days at the end of all this [smile]
0 likes 2 comments

Comments

Ravuya
Sorry, 3D graphics technology has left your engine in the dust. We're no longer drawing polygons, we're drawing uber-tesselated multidimensional hoogenfluts.

Without an engine capable of drawing 1.6 trillion uber-tesselated multidimensional hoogenfluts per frame I'm afraid your game is going to be dead in the water. Sorry! Maybe if you travel back in time about 30 minutes.
June 20, 2006 08:41 AM
ApochPiQ
Damn... beaten by technology yet again. [crying]

I'd start working on my hoogenfluts renderer, but I hear määrgrhuten accelerator hardware is on the horizon, and I'd hate to repeat this experience.
June 20, 2006 06:03 PM
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