I haven't browsed through my journal so I'm not quite sure where I left off but I think it had something to do with me not getting a job. Well, they called me back a few months later and offered me a position which I accepted. I've now been happily working in the industry for about 9 months now!
Anyway, enough catching up on the saga of my life, let's get caught up my engine development, shall we?
My poor engine. I've neglected it for so long and just recently came back to work on it again. Can you imagine what that must be like. At first you're getting to spend tons of time with me and then all of a sudden, BAM!, I throw you in a folder and turn off the lights. I'm a bastard like that sometimes though, and you or anyone else who wants to spend time with me just has to accept this.
So now that my engine and I have made ammends, I decided to treat it to a few upgrades.
Recently I've implemented a 3DS loader, Maya loader, Batching system, Resource manager, and did a bit of reconstructive surgery on the design a bit.
Overall I'm very happy with how it's turning out although there are definitely times where I come across some older code and just can't help but punch myself in the face because I can't figure out wtf I was thinking when I wrote it. So in turn I spend a lot of time rethinking and reworking bits and pieces of the code; But who doesn't?
Next up on my plate is skeletal animation. This will only be for the maya models because that's the only thing my artists use! I'm still doing a lot of reading although everything seems fairly straight forward.
Somewhere in there I'm also going to put in a stream manager for my up and coming material manager of awesomeness! Okay, it probably won't be the most spectacular thing in the world, but it will be flexible and hopefully fast.
Also, if anyone needs assistance in loading either 3DS or Maya files, please don't hesitate to ask. Figuring out some of this stuff was a bit of a pain so I figure I'll share any knowledge I gained. Neither of them currently load any animation data... yet.
Oh, and leave me some comments if you read this. I don't care if it's just to say "Hi." or "You suck at programming."
Keep it real,
NoMonkey
