Virtualized Scenes and Rendering

A while back I was posting frequently about all of the progress that I was making with my Lua scripting system and exposing my engine to the script world (see here). I ended up working on FeedBack and my D3D11 renderer for a while, and slowed down a bit on the scripting side of things. However, near the end of that period I had actually just wrapped up a few new engine objects which I wrapped to be available in scripts as well: 'Cameras' and 'Scenes'.

As luck would have it, I have also been working towards virtualizing my windowing system based on another post regarding multiple simultaneous window rendering (here). This work eventually got me to the point that I developed an abstract 'RenderWindow' that could be subclassed for whatever type of windowing toolkit that could provide a window handle (such as Qt, wxWidgets, MFC, or Win32 (see here again)). This worked out quite well, and I decided to add another implementation - the virtual window.

This more or less is represented by a few abstractions in my engine, and a render view is used to render the image in the same fashion that the camera and scene interfaces work. The end result is that it is now pretty easy to render to pretty much anything in the 3D scene in addition to exterior windows. Here's a development shot from a sample test scene where the text on the left window is updating live, and the tusk model on the right is rotating, all the while the actual camera that is viewing the entire scene is also rotating:



I have a few ideas of what to do with the new technology, but I'll be keeping those to myself for a few more weeks (that thesis is still taking up a bunch of my time...). Of course, once I get around to using it I'll be sure to post it here for your 'peer review' [grin].