Archive for May, 2009
Exporting Effects
Posted by Eric DeBrosse in Engine Development on May 24, 2009
I’m just about finished adding “DirectX Shader” material support to my 3ds Max exporter plug-in. All of the effect parameters that you specify in the rollout will get exported with the subsets of a mesh. I had to add new features to the Orion Engine SDK to support this. The new parameter system that I recently added to the mesh file loader can also be used to easily store user-defined parameters with each of the meshes.
I’m taking the top-down approach to finishing the engine’s effect handling. I plan on finishing the exporter soon. All of the new mesh data is being saved and loaded. Next I need to update the core mesh object to support all of the new things that are exported from the exporter. Once I have that working, then I’m going to start adding some of the new functionality to the game!
I may be slow lately, but everything’s coming together very nicely. These things have all required a lot of planning and deep thought.
Gatekeeper Server Corruption
Posted by Eric DeBrosse in Hardware on May 9, 2009
It’s inevitable, the more computers that you own, the more problems you are going to have!
There were a few power outages recently that took their toll on the Gatekeeper server’s file system. It wasn’t worth fixing, so I went ahead and installed a fresh copy of Fedora 10 Linux. I need to get a battery backup for this computer! Anyway, I luckily had a current backup of all the important data. Everything is back to normal now.
I want to install Fedora 11 once it’s released. I think I’m going to install a fresh copy, since I’ve had problems in the past with upgrading. While I was rebuilding the server this time, I kept better notes on how to do everything again; so that it will be even easier the next time to get the server setup exactly like I want it.
Tangents, Bitangents and Binormals
Posted by Eric DeBrosse in Engine Development on May 7, 2009
I’m still updating the 3ds Max mesh file exporter that I use with the engine. I already had a feature to export per-vertex diffuse colors, but now I also have a feature to export per-vertex shading and/or illumination colors. Many shader effects require tangents and binormals to be calculated, i.e. to do normal mapping, a.k.a. bump mapping. To be more correct, the word”bitangent” should be used in place of ”binormal”. Supposedly the wrong term was used and it just stuck. Well, since 3ds Max, DirectX and my engine all use the word “binormal”, I’m just going to stick with it. Anyway, I’m in the process of adding this support to the exporter right now. It’s going to be cool to use these new features in the game! It’s been a long time waiting.
Custom 3ds Max Exporter
Posted by Eric DeBrosse in Engine Development on May 1, 2009
I updated the Orion Engine 3ds Max exporter plug-in to work with 3ds Max 2010 (R12). There were some changes with how assets are enumerated, i.e. texture files, effect files, etc. The latest changes were implemented as a conditional compilation, based on which 3ds Max SDK is selected to build against. In fact, I can now easily build the plug-in for many versions/releases of 3ds Max, all using the same source code tree. The recent progress that I’ve made with the exporter makes me very pleased. I added a new screen shot of the exporter running on Windows Vista in 3ds Max 2010 to the Orion Genesis home page. Now I need to get back to finishing the integration of the new effect system with the material editor in Orion Genesis. I may be busy during the month of May!