Category Archives: Engine Development

The Team Foundation Server ended up having some bad memory.  So, I replaced all of the memory.  I went ahead and upgraded it from 2 GB to 4 GB while I was at it.  It’s back online now.  Development has resumed again on the engine.  I’m finally … Continue reading →

In order to finish the animation system, I need to finish the mesh data attribute sorting code.  The vertices must be sorted by the number of bone influences, as this determines which vertex shader should be used for each batch.  … Continue reading →

I’ve been making changes to the base scene object.  Now there is a flag that you can use to render the current scene object after all of the children have been rendered, instead of the other way around.  This was needed due to … Continue reading →

I’ve been working a lot on the skinned mesh support in the engine lately.  I was having a problem with the engine’s 3ds Max exporter crashing when you exported a mesh that contained physique, but I have that fixed now.  If you … Continue reading →

I’m currently updating the mesh scene object hierarchy to support skinning data.  The skin weights, and the bone data, are already exported by the custom 3ds Max exporter.  All of this data can be successfully loaded by the engine.  I’ve also been working on the HLSL vertex shader … Continue reading →

I made some changes to the .fx effect file importer for the world builder.  Not only can it promote 1.x shaders to version 2.0, it can also automatically compile the legacy 1.x shaders and include them in the effect file as well.  … Continue reading →

I finally got all of the shader effects working on the sky dome today!  It looks pretty sweet!  I’ve been getting all of the kinks worked out of the effect system in the engine.  There are just a few more … Continue reading →

While working on the sky dome scene object, I realized there was still a lot of work to be done in the effect system.  I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks refining how effect parameters and/or effect constants work.  Now, it’s … Continue reading →

I started working on a new sky dome scene object today.  This scene object will be much better than the current sky box implementation that the engine uses.  It’s much easier to animate textures on a dome, as compared to a box … Continue reading →