the matrix was a documentary
What you see above is a custom model I made in 3ds Max, exported as a COLLADA *.dae file, and imported into my DirectX engine. I figured I’d start with something simple, like a soda can, and I plan to make a lot more models going forward. Although
Programmer art is great and all, but I’d really like to see some complex models inside the engine. Unfortunately, DirectX 11 does not include a built-in way to load in 3D models. As I’ve mentioned before, I am interested in using COLLADA has the import format. Since COLLADA
After some more testing, it looks like OGRE is not the savior it seemed like yesterday. While the static geometry boosted frame-rates greatly, it’s only useful for, well, static objects. Meaning the models can’t move or animate. I did find another option, instancing, which initially looked promising. It
Looks like I spoke too soon. While OGRE was getting pretty slow with the naive implementation, I was able to find some code on what they call StaticGeometry, which is a system to batch together lots of similar meshes that don’t move (great for my cube example project).
Seeing as performance has been on my mind recently, I tweaked the core render loop a bit and saw some reasonable gains. The one thing I realized is that most of the objects in the scene are static, and don’t need their combined transformed matrices recalculated every frame. I
I don’t have much time, so I will be brief. Basically for the past few days I have been trying to optimize the engine. With the stress test you see above (around 13K cubes) I was only getting around 200 fps. Just slightly above my target of 120
Today I have gotten the camera system to a decent place, and made a simple free look demo. Most of the code had already been implemented, inside the vector and matrix classes, I just had to piece it together into a camera object. I also added a
Though the above video might not seem like an overly impressive jump from the last, there’s actually a ton of work behind it. The new additions include a node-based scene graph hierarchy, more robust math libraries, and keyboard control using DirectInput. Plus, I’ve tried to abstract as much as I
The demo is starting to shape up now, with texture mapping and some simple lighting (ambient and directional). To be fair, I’m not sure if I would really call this an “engine” quite yet. It’s still very much a bare-bones, hard-coded demo done in DirectX 11. But
Game Engine Gems 1 By Eric Lengyel is a book I discovered on Amazon, but really hadn’t heard of or seen talked about anywhere else. I do recognize the editor, Eric Lengyel, as the creator of the C4 Engine and author of the classic textbook Mathematics for 3D Game Programming
