User:GMan/Journal

From GPWiki

I'm putting this project to a halt for amoment. I'd like to dig into C++ for a while.

--GMan 23:05, 27 Feb 2005 (EST)

I started building my Game Engine about a month ago. Its coming along quite nicley. I gave rudimentry Input (mouse and keyboard) functions, but this time I'm focusing on GVision (3D Graphics Library). This time, you ask? Well, a year ago I tried to do this, but my severe lack of knowledge in DirectX8 hindered me. It DID have awesome Networking and DirectDraw functions, but DDraw is DX7, which is why I was so good at it. But now I'm getting the hang of DX8 and finally moving on.

So far I have a "Mesh" class, which has functions for generating shapes. It optimizes them and generates texture coordinates (thank you Almar...). It has optimized Matrix handling and some other useful "stuff".

I also have a material and texture pool. Im proud of this. To assign a texture or material, there are two properties in any mesh/model/anything-that-can-have-a-texture-or-material, called "TextureName" and "MaterialName". When initializing a texture or material, you also assign it a name. So by setting the properties above to the loaded textures, the texture or material is automatically set.

Almost done...:)

My camera supports simple things like zooming...wow.

And my lights class is rather nice. It is very orginized and easy to use. Which brings up another focus of mine, orginization. I once used Revolution3D, which was pretty good. But I disliked it because things were so...messy. I'm sure if I wanted I could have spent time learning things, but I'd rather just make my own.

Thats about it! The engine has complete automatic enumeration, but I give the option of overriding that. It also has a simple text renderer. Now I'm working on the particle engine.

--GMan 21:58, 29 Nov 2004 (EST)