Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 17)

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 16)

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 15)

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).

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 14)

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 13)

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 12)

  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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 11)

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

Creating a 3D Game Engine (Part 10)

  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

Review: Game Engine Gems 1 By Eric Lengyel

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

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