Hi all,
I figured I have enough now to show, so I thought I'd give an update from the programming department!
The engine is coming along nicely, and I just finished a bit of model loading code.
Here's the first textured cube rendered by the engine! So far the loader can handle static, textured meshes, but soon I'll have animation/skinning/HLSL shading up and running. Currently, I'm loading in .x files exported from Blender just for convenience's sake (I get to put my exporter to work!
), but we have plans to ditch .x (which is a rather dated format anyway), and implement our own that will be much more tailored to our needs. I'm sure that'll be a while down the road, as I have yet to design the format let alone write it an exporter for Blender.
This is really my first time writing an engine from scratch like this, so I'm pretty excited at my progress and I've learned a whole lot about the innards of DirectX. Being very familiar with DBPro, seeing how ridiculously fast this thing (albeit very simple) is rendering, and how it uses 0-1 percent of my CPU makes me realize just how limiting DBPro is. I mean, DBPro is really great for quickly prototyping ideas, but beyond that, if you want any kind of performance, write it yourself.
Anyhoo, just thought I'd share what was going on on this end of things. Feel free to ask about anything I might be able to answer. I'd be happy to answer anything about this development, or even getting started with DirectX programming.
Edit:
@PrimalBeans: I've committed all of the changes to the repository so the new code's all there for you to check it out.