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.