We have been some progress of course this week.
- Started Managed wrapper, having an hard time with String conversion (lol). ATL/COM wrapper still going well too.
- Built an internal shader editor to test shaders in real time without too much hassle.
- Core of MaterialFactory, LightEngine, RenderSurface done. Works
- Mesh format settings fixed.
- Done a DOT3 Bumpmapping (with Directional Lighting) test, worked quite well with the shader system. But Bumpmapping will be included by default in the engine. So it will be quite fast
- Light engine basic system working. This system allows to bypass the 8-lights per scene limit, and actually it makes the rendering faster ! It uses a clever device lights algorithms and checks the distance between lights and bounding sphere of objects (works with Point and Spot lights). Logically for landscape it should work to, so you will have a limit of 8lights per Mesh / Landscape Chunk.... and the engine manages this itself...
- Made some research on Water effect (with environment bumpmapping) and rendersurfaces, and also
- Created two new own formats for static meshs and textures, called respectively TVM (TrueVision Model) and TVT (TrueVision Texture). It allows to save everything the engine needs into a file and to load it back in a really optimal way. For example, for a car we use currently for testing, it takes 2300 ms to load the .X file and optimize it... and when you load it from a TVM file, the loads it in 20ms
and then you can duplicate it without any problem 100 times withouht delay. This will allow really fast loading for you game. Same for textures, the engine doesn't have to recreate mipmap because they are already stored in the file. So it just copies the data at the good place...
- Streaming technology : TVM and TVT formats are adapted to the Streaming technology, that means that you can read TVM and TVT files from any storage place : file, archive, memory. It's transparent for the engine. Same to save the file, you can save it to a stream. Other formats should be supported also for streaming but you will have to specify the size of the file, the engine can't detect that automatically.
- New TVA (TrueVision Animated model) will be the new format for animated model. It will be expandable and will have two main modes : keyframed (like md2 or md3) and skinned (like x or mdl). To allow custom shaders for effect (or to compute shadows), the engine will be able to compute the animation in the CPU and then leave the GPU do the shader effect. This will be a little slower if your application is CPU-bound but you at least get shadows and bump effects. Of course the standard skinning mode in hardware will be still present.
oups I think I said to much for today :p as you can see everything is going well, but we can't predict the release date of this new engine yet...
