I need the procedurally generated mesh primitives in the engine to support shader effects.  For example, in the Orion Genesis material editor the basic primitives are used to preview the currently selected effect.  Well, in order to support effects that use texture maps, the primitives need to have at least one set of UV coordinates in each of the vertices.  So I’ve been spending a little time lately adding this support to the engine.  I finished adding UV coordinates to the box shape, and am nearly finished with the sphere.  The problem with the sphere and/or ellipsoid is the texture is being applied backwards.  It looks great; I just have to reverse it.  For some reason, this is easier said then done!  I’ll figure it out; I guess it’s just getting late.

I’m probably going to keep working on Orion Genesis for a little while longer.  There are a few more things that I need to finish.  I added a new screen shot to the Orion Genesis web page that shows a simple lighting effect on the sphere primitive.  The vertex normals generate very smooth shading, and the UV coordinates merge nicely at the poles!

I always hate this time of the year, it seems to leave me in a depressed mood.  It’s when I have to give some of my money to the government.  Since I’m self-employed, I don’t get any money back — I didn’t pay anything quarterly last year.  Oh well, it should all be over soon.

I think I have all of the bugs worked out in the engine’s effect system!  I’m finished adding the code needed to get the sampler states and/or textures all working nicely.  Now, I just need to test it to see if everything works as expected.  I’ll need to start working on Orion Genesis again for a little while, so that it can preview all of the effects properly.  Also, I want to be able to edit all of the effect parameters in the Material Editor dialog.  Based on the annotations that are found, I should be able to automatically link up some of the parameters when an effect is loaded.  For example, an application (or the tool) could automatically apply the world, view and projection matrices, the current frame time, etc.  I hope to have this stuff all ready soon.

What I thought were bugs in the effect system ended up just being incomplete code in the .fx file importer that I use with Orion Genesis.  I think the importer can now handle nearly any syntax and/or any expression encountered, the parsing of the file is a lot better.  I can actually load and render some of my effects in the engine now!  However, there is still a problem with the rendering of some shaders.  I can’t quite put my finger on the exact problem yet.  Also, I don’t think all of the texture sampler states are properly handled yet.  I need to do a little more work in order to have texturing fully functional.  I’m going to keep pushing forward.

OK, so it may be April Fools Day – but there’s no fooling around going on here, only some serious coding!  I found the bug that was giving me problems in Orion Genesis.  It turned out to be an issue with the effect manager in the engine itself.  The effects were being prematurely unloaded.  I also discovered, and fixed, a bug that caused Orion Genesis to close unexpectedly when using the debug version of the Direct3D run-time.

I’m going to continue debugging the new effect system now.  I hope to have everything working well soon.  I had actually planned to have the effect system code finished by now.  I’ve been working on it for about 2 months.  However, it turned out to be way more complicated than I had originally planned.  Oh well, at least I’m getting closer now.