I’ve been extremely busy working on the effect file importers for the Orion Genesis world builder tool.  OK, maybe more on the HLSL (.fx file) importer, not so much on the CgFX (.cgfx file) importer.  Also, I’ve been ironing out how the effect parameter semantics and annotations will be handled within my architecture.  I’ll be following the SAS (Standard Annotations and Semantics) guidelines.  Anyway, I’m starting to see that I’m going to be spending quite a lot of time working on these importers.  But it will all be worth it.  Even though the effect system in the engine still needs more work, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel – and let me tell you, it sure is bright!

I’ve been working on the custom, cross-platform, Orion Engine effect system this week.  I’m trying to fill in all of the blanks that have been needing attention for quite a long time.  The effect system is used to drive our pixel shaders and vertex shaders.  It’s main responsibility is to seamlessly provide a fallback, if one particular rendering method is not supported by the hardware.  In other words, it will make the Orion Engine even more scalable; i.e. it will work great on old hardware, yet it can still look awesome on new hardware.  It also manages all of the render states that are needed to render a particular shader effect.

Anyway, it might be a little while before I get back to patching the game client again.  I need to finish the effect system first, and be done with it once and for all.  Once I finally have the effect system finished, I’ll be able to create even more stunning effects in the game!

Wow, January disappeared fast! There just never seems to be enough time in the day, and the days just seem to keep getting shorter.

I finished several hard problems last month. I also fixed a lot of little bugs that have been bothering me for a while. For example, there was a weird bug with my TGA file loader that caused images compressed using RLE (run length encoding) to look funny sometimes. I also finished adding support for the mouse wheel to my 3D window/control library. Now you can use the mouse wheel to move the vertical scroll bar on a text box.

It always makes me feel good to know that my code is more complete and robust. I don’t want to move too far ahead, if there are still unresolved issues.