I’ve been playing around with Unity3d lately and am fairly impressed. I just put together this little prototype of a click-to-move system with free camera movement. Supporting multiple character units for a turn based-rpg game setup.
I just want to say that I’ve been really busy lately, but have not abandoned this website. Things have really picked up at work, and right now I am 100% focused on making sure Elder Scrolls Online is as good as it can be on my teams.
Keep up the good work Zenimax Online! I hope you all plan to play ESO!
I just finished getting Tangent Space Normal and Spec Mapping working after a few days of frustrating bugs. Very happy tonight!
Success! I was able to write a full exporter for Blender 2.63 that exports the DEngine Static Mesh format. So far, the engine can load these models with textures for Diffuse color and material properties for Lambert-Phong lighting. Next step is to hook up loading Spec from a texture instead of a straight color per material. Then Normal Mapping.
I just put the final touches on my own custom model format this morning to replace MS3D and everything works! I wrote an export script for Blender for my custom format and loaded it in the engine code. As of right now, the implementation is duplicate to what was working with MS3D, but because the data layout is friendlier for Shaders, it loads even faster than before! I’m not sure why most the 3d model formats out there aren’t more straight forward. Every game, every shader application, in modern GPU programming needs per Vertex data.
Before jumping into my own format, I assessed other popular formats as well. FBX, X, 3DS, these all have downfalls. FBX seemed too bloated, it is a full SDK with more functionality than I need and I spent a whole day just reading the documentation. X format seems pretty nice, but there is no binary exporter for Blender currently, if I wanted to use this format I’d have to write it myself. 3DS is a popular format, but does not include per vertex normals, it only stores face normals (smoothing groups).
I was progressing just fine, but recently hit the realization that the .MS3D 3d model format does not support Normal Map textures, or any other textures besides Diffuse! What a downer! I was really liking this format. Well, it is back to the drawing board. Currently I’m testing out the Autodesk FBX SDK. It is heavier than what I was looking for, but it at least has support for modern features and every 3d package supports it.
Check out the first tutorial on Windows WIN32 window creation with OpenGL 3.2 context in CPP!
I’ve decided to offer tutorials based on my code as I progress through my DEngine project. Expect to see the first few tutorials within the next week or so.
Available, initially, will be tutorials on cross-platform window creation with DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3, and cross-platform object oriented code. This will give a good foundation to build upon so that after window creation, code can have little to no platform dependent code.
Next will be tutorials on the basics of both DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.2. Then will be examples of the common graphics features used in game engines.
Stay tuned!
I started writing my own home-brew game engine, “DEngine”. It is a cross-platform 3d Game Engine. I’m doing this for fun and education so I’m not sure how far I’ll get. Here is the plan.
Features:
Currently Complete:
A long way to go! Hoorah!
