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 much easier for an application to update and manage the effect constant values.
It took me a while, but I also figured out how to render the dome as a single triangle strip. Before, I was rendering the top as a triangle fan, and then the rest as a triangle strip. This meant an extra draw call was needed for every pass in the effect technique. Besides, I had to get rid of the triangle fan, since D3D10 no longer supports that primitive type.
I need to finish fixing a bug that causes searches for a specific effect technique/instance to fail. However, I’m very close to getting the shader effects to work on the sky dome!
