Journal of Lee Stripp

Have a great Easter everyone, I'm offline for 3 weeks. Let the chocolate flow !!

I've been busy adding non-visual additions to the engine, so nothing to interesting to post until now.. I'm currently adding Level management which also includes Menus and Loaders. I want these systems to be very flexible and that's why they are basically the same thing. All levels have a scene manager, asset manager, pass manager and composite...

I've been working on the particle system again, fixed some issues and added some new features.

Video shows 1000 particles, emit rate 100 every 5 seconds and at death it sets each particles gravity to 0. Not sure what this feature could be used for but I just thought it would be cool to have...

I've been working on the particle system again, fixed some issues and added some new features.

Video shows 1000 particles, emit rate 100 every 5 seconds and at death it sets each particles gravity to 0. Not sure what this feature could be used for but I just thought it would be cool to have...

Property Settings panel all working now. The app can now Move any selected object to an exact position/rotation/scale and also set base Material colours etc.. Choosing to use a generic property system is now starting to pay off as all values are modified the same way, also working in with the animation system, so cool :-)

New properties have been added for materials. For now multi-materials are just listed together. No way of knowing which is which, I will fix this soon.

New Settings panel started for quick adjustments with room for more options.

This app is only for Scene/Level editing, its not a modeler, I feel there are much better tools...

Today's updates :

Started the day with 2 things I wanted fixed..

1. Particles were spawning inside each other and as you may know this is bad when using physics :-) All fixed !! I build a spawn position list at creation time, works nicely. You can see the issue in my previous post (video).

2. Nokia Qt demo had no mouse take over...

Back and already done some fun stuff.. I'm rewriting my shaders for version 330 so forgive the lighting !!

Added a new particle system that supports bullet physics or animation per particle. Material is shared so animation will effect every object. No billboards yet, I may make another scene node for billboard particles anyway for best...

I'm taking 2 weeks off coding to read more books and figure out what my first tech demo should look like. Pure tech or Location design, its funny but I'm finding this to be the hardest part, as in the idea! I think its a very important stage in the process and don’t want to plunge right into it. Taking a step back from time to time is a good...

Now I have material animation working, but as you may know there is the issue of shadow casting when animating the Alpha Chanel.. I've opted for a User setting that lets them turn ON/OFF Depth buffer writes.. I'm wondering if that is the best option, I just cant think of any simple way to adjust shadows on an object by object basis... For instance...