Orion Engine Blog

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 tried to export a skinned mesh that was not already triangulated (i.e. a NURBs surface), then the number of skinned vertices would not match the number of vertices actually in the mesh data.

I also added some new features to the .fx effect file importer in the world builder.  There were some issues that needed worked out, so that I could load the effect file that is going to be used to render the skinned meshes.

So, I finally have all of the data that I need.  Now I just need to finish the skinned mesh support in the mesh object itself.

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 in the effect file that will be used to render the skinned meshes.  I may need to make some small changes to the effect system, to make things work out exactly the way that I want.  I hope to be testing this all out very soon.

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.  This way if the effect system detects that it’s running on legacy hardware, then the older less optimized shaders can be selected.  Of course, newer shader models can also be included in the effect file.  The best available effect implementation will be chosen, based on the hardware that the engine is currently running on.

I also updated the material editor in the world builder to reflect the changes that were recently made to the effect system.  There is a small bug that was introduced with these new changes that I would like to locate and fix before I move on.

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 small things that I want to take care of this week.  Then I would like to integrate the sky dome into the game demo.  I would also like to spend a little time updating the material editor in the world builder, to reflect the changes in the effect system.

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!

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 and the inherent perspective problems at the corners.  The dome can be flattened out some, to help give the illusion that the clouds are rolling off into the horizon.  Multiple day and night textures can be blended together, to make smooth and seamless transitions from day to night.  Parallax is simulated in the star layers, to create a greater perception of depth.