Orion Engine Blog

I finally had some time today to track down the source of the animation problem that I was having. I recently thought the exporting of animation data was broken in my 3ds max exporter, however it in fact seems to be working correctly. It turns out there was a small bug in the new animation controller code. It is fixed now. This is great news. I should be able to finish tightening up the animation system code within the next week or two. There isn’t much remaining that needs to be finished!

The main animation controller code has been finished. It has been fully integrated with the mesh object code as well. It’s finally ready for some basic testing! The only problem is, it does not appear animation data is being properly exported from my 3ds max exporter. Unfortunately, I’ll need to spend some time finding the problem before I can proceed. Once I get the exporter to work again, then I can finish the animation track blending features. I’ll probably finish the optional compressed animation set code later. This will enable me to move on to more important things.

The keyframed animation controller code is coming along nicely. I took a break from it today to create a few new scene objects. I made some simple scaling, rotation and translation (SRT) objects that can be used to animate any scene object, in basic ways. It’s pretty cool, I can put lots of moving and spinning objects in the scenes now. These new objects are very lightweight, i.e. they don’t eat a lot of CPU time to animate.

I’m glad to be working on the animation code again. When I was working on it before, there were just too many other things that needed ported from the old engine to the new engine first. Actually, the new generic animation controller was nearly complete when I quit working on it. Our 3ds max exporter is totally ready to export animation sets along with the exported mesh data. I just finished integrating an animation controller with the mesh scene object. I had to work out a few small bugs today, since the animation code was never tested before. The basic hierarchical mesh animation stuff should all be working soon! Unfortunately, I need to do a little more work on the effect system, before I can implement the mesh skinning required for our advanced character animation system. However, I’m making great progress! It’s all coming together.

While I was reviewing the mesh classes for any changes required to integrate my animation controller, I noticed an issue with how Genesis renders its backbuffers into the viewports. I spent a few days working this out and finally came up with a great solution. Now, I can actually simplify the engine video driver plug-in architecture as a direct result. This is awesome, since it will make it a lot easier to finish my OpenGL driver. I’m going to spend some time today cleaning up all of the video driver code.

I finally finished the Texture Viewer for the Orion Genesis world builder today. Development has been moving slow lately, because I’ve been busy with other things. I’m going to resume work on the mesh animation system. I hope to have it ready soon, so that I can move on to more important things, like the effect system.

Welcome to the Orion Engine Blog!  My name is Eric DeBrosse, I’m the lead developer of the Orion Engine.  I’ll be using this area to post details about the current progress of the engine.  Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of development time into the Orion Genesis World Builder.  The world builder contains a lot of new features, it’s starting to work pretty awesome!