Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 9)

 

Today I have finally gotten a simple sort of animation working. It looks easy, but I made my life a lot harder by implementing by own math library. So far I have a Vector3D and a Matrix4x4 class almost finished. Well the Vector class is pretty much done. The Matrix class still needs some fleshing out, but I got it working well enough to spin a triangle. I realize I could have used the D3DX library (which is deprecated), or XNAMath (also deprecated), or DirectXMath (safe for now), but I thought making my own math functions would be a good learning experience. I did also have to reimplement D3DXMatrixLookAtLH and D3DXMatrixPerspectiveFovLH, but Microsoft is nice enough to list the equations in their documentation (thanks!).

In addition, I got a lot of help from this book, 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, which may be one of the best I’ve seen for 3D math. While there are other books, this text has very clear explanations, equations, and actual C++ implementations. I did try my best not to “cheat” and just copy the code, and instead based it on the equations listed. Unfortunately, I got cocky and wrote the length function without checking the reference, and left out the square root function call by accident (resulting in about a hour of debugging). Eventually I figured it out, but not after checking pretty much everything else with a fine-toothed comb. No worries, it’s working now.

Feels nice to see some movement on the screen. For this week I’d like to get a textured cube spinning. Also, I realized that DirectX 11 doesn’t come with a way to import models out-of-box. So pretty soon I will probably have to write a model importer (I’m looking at COLLADA now). Sometimes I wonder if all this work is really worth it, especially with Unreal Engine 4 at $19/month at the moment. I guess I do realize I can likely never hope to compete with the big commercial engines, but I still think this is a great exercise of the mind. We’ll see how long I can keep my faith.