Completing 3D UI System

After a week of great progress being made, I am very close to completing my 3D UI system. This comprises several major updates to the engine, ranging from the addition of an event system, addition of the actual UI system (made up of aggregates of existing objects), and the completion of my material system.

That last point may need a little explanation. As I posted a short while ago, I wanted to be able to have text rendered on a 3D object that will be used as a component of the UI. My material system is completely data driven to select the appropriate render views to execute prior to rendering an object. In the context of rendering text on an object, that means that a texture needs to be rendered to with the appropriate text prior to rendering the 3D objects that make up the UI. All that is needed is an XML file defining the material and requesting a 'pre-render' view to update the texture.

This is the part that was finished up over the last day or two - automating all of the pre-rendering that needs to take place. It's not much to look at currently, but the picture below shows two UI object functioning as push buttons, with the live frame rate rendered onto it (backwards to emphasize the fact that it is a texture applied to the object and not the text rendered onto the backbuffer[grin]):



My next tasks are to make these things a little more pretty, and then use my shiny new material system to implement reflective objects. That, along with putting together a downloadable demo to see what you all think about it...