Hello, oups I see this diary isn't really a diary but rather a "monthly" or whatever it's called
During this month, we did some more work on TV6.5 version, TVActor2 is almost 50% done. And it's a painful thing to do because some internal vertex shaders had to be written for the skinning.
Actually for people liking the tech information, here you go : there are two modes : one using standard vertex blending of the GPU which is actually supported in GF1/GF2, and an Vertex shaders mode, which is supported on all lastest cards in hardware.
Considering that the VertexShader mode can have 16 matrix constants associated to it, it can handle 16 bones at one time, so with this mode you need usually less Render calls and state changes, which is good for speed.
Standard vertex blending can handle 2 or 4 bones at one time so it needs a lot of render calls and state changes, but it's very compatible with older cards, which is always nice, and it can fallback to CPU computations if needed.
Morph targets computation (for facial or state animations) will be done entirely on CPU, because this way you can have an infinite number of poses that can be blended, but it will need dynamic vertex buffering which can be a bandwidth problem later. I will see if I can optimize this, and for example try to put vertices that don't change into a static buffer.
On the other hand, we are working to fix all the current 6.0 stuff, to release the patch this week. Thanks to people who reported bugs ! Remember it will have every sample fixed in all languages, and special additions to the c++ wrapper to handle lights and arrays correctly.
See you later this week for a new diary!
