Monday, November 17, 2014

Next Phase Completion!

Since the UI overhaul mentioned last time, I've been working on some graphics stuff, and can happily now say that it is complete, and kinda nifty!


  • We now have a geometry and material pipeline of sorts. 
    • Basically I wrote a tool that can process geometry, tweak it, reorient it, and kick it back out into a custom format for World.
    • I also wrote a materials and shader system to go along with it. It works for straight meshes and character rigs. The geometry processor can apply materials too.
    • The new file loads as a new type 'Model' rather than 'Mesh', so lots of the existing code has to migrate to Models (which have materials). But that's done and good so props and stuff can have materials.
  • We now have a skinner.
    • Another tool that takes a rig and a model, and lets the user apply vertices to a rig joint, then preprocesses the whole thing to be used by the character skinning engine.
    • Both the Skin and Model processor are built off of my Froge and Scene libraries, which are maturing nicely. Froge is a C# <-> JS engine to build up easy UIs. It's terrible if you care what it looks like, but it has native support for most stuff I need for a tester or light tool. The scenes just manage a simple display loop with a built in Awesomium frontend, with Froge attached. 
  • We now have a turtle!
    • Max's turtle obj has been model-ified, rigged and skinned, and a small set of animations sculpted. It's kind of neat, and it opens the way for more textured and modelly characters.
  • We have a new display system for Morale!
    • Since all the display and material and skin code changed, and now characters are rendered with materials, the special case morale-borders is gone.
    • So I built a new multi-pass setup for showing outlines for units, that glow based on the unit morale. I also added a sort of upward and downwards flow to the outline based on the way morale is changing over time. It's lots more subtle than the old way, but it's lots cleaner and I think much better
Here're some clips!

Yay turtles :)