September 10, 2010
Lessons Learned from Multithreading
My posts haven't been very frequent lately due to being extremely busy working on a book project. There are two other authors working with me, and I think the project is really starting to shape up. Even with all of the writing, I have still been working on Hier…
August 26, 2010
Hieroglyph 3 Multithreaded Update
It has been ages since my last post, and I've been super busy lately... However, the multithreaded version of Hieroglyph has been pushed to codeplex. Currently I've only had time to update the Ambient Occlusion and Water Simulation samples, but they seem to be wor…
July 25, 2010
Multithreaded Rendering in Hieroglyph 3
After some serious debugging, I have true multithreaded rendering working in Hieroglyph 3 now. It is always astonishing to me how much more difficult it is to debug a program when it is multithreaded as opposed to single threaded... Its like the difference b…
July 23, 2010
D3D11 Deferred Contexts
So, all the major surgery has been completed, and now that things are back up and running nicely I wanted to discuss deferred contexts just a little bit. From the DXSDK docs, conference presentations, and other various posts that google churned up, there is surprisingly litt…
July 18, 2010
Major Surgery
In the first steps towards adding multithreading support into Hieroglyph (as discussed here) I have been quite busy with a major surgery on my renderer - and I'm beginning to make some good progress. I decided that I was going to split the functionality of my current renderer into thr…
July 07, 2010
Multithreaded Rendering with D3D11
Lately I have been splitting my time between writing some new material for a forth coming project and trying to understand the design differences needed to allow multithreaded rendering in D3D11. Since the latter is the more complicated one, I thought I would fles…
July 01, 2010
Rendering System with Lua
Now that I have a basic Lua interface set up, I added some additional basic functionality, such as attaching two actors together as parent/child, and I also added an interface for the script to modify rendering parameters for a given entity or its material. I figured this …
June 25, 2010
Lua meets Hieroglyph
I've been planning to start using Lua again for scripting in Hieroglyph 3 for quite some time. Initially I had planned to follow the same pattern as I had for Hieroglyph 2, which was basically to try to expose everthing in the script and have more or less every option available…
June 17, 2010
Multiple Render Targets
I have been wanting to add multiple render target support to Hieroglyph for a while, and finally sat down for a little while and got it implemented. It actually required a small architectural change to how I represent the rendering pipeline, so I thought I would discuss it b…
June 05, 2010
Refining Objects for Hieroglyph
I have had a few weeks to think about where to take Hieroglyph from here, and I hinted at a few ideas back in a previous post regarding simplicity in interfaces based on how the Processing language builds its interface. After spending some time with Unity as well, I …
May 30, 2010
Back Into A Groove
After being a little bogged down for the past few weeks (or months I guess) it seems like I am finally starting to find my stride again. I am beginning to become productive in my writing again, and Hieroglyph is coming along too. Some of the topics that I am writing about are ac…
May 26, 2010
Beginning Doxygen
At another suggestion, Doxygen was recommended for generating automatic documentation for Hieroglyph. I managed to download and start reading the manual, but haven't made it too much further yet. It will be an iterative process, but I will start documenting the major classes as t…
May 23, 2010
Web Refresher
On some advice from my last post, I have downloaded and installed Expression Web 3 from my MSDN subscription. While there, I also took the time to finally download and install Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, and Visio 2010. All together, it took quite a while (actually I'm still wai…
May 19, 2010
Moving On...
After a little research into the matter, I think I'm going to utilize the google app engine to serve up a static web page that I will be either manually generating, or creating with a web page editor... In either case, it will be free and only serve the purposes of aggregating informat…
May 16, 2010
The Eye of Horus
I spent a little time this weekend making an icon to be associated with the Hieroglyph 3 engine. I'm no artist, so I searched the web for a few ancient Egyptian images as a reference, eventually coming up with the "Eye of Horus" as the basis for the icon. I have used Inkscape for …
May 12, 2010
Processing...
Part of getting ready to modify my scripting solution has been to take a look around at other scripted graphics applications, and see what they are doing well and (perhaps more importantly) what they are doing not so well. There are of course many games and engines out there that util…
May 09, 2010
D3D11 Resource Visualization
I've been spending some time rethinking how my Lua scripting system is going to look in its second generation. I don't want to totally change the system, but there will be some significant simplification and streamlining of the binding process this time around. I've be…
May 02, 2010
Next Steps for Hieroglyph
Since wrapping up the skinning code, I've been cleaning up and commenting a few areas that were lacking due to all of the debugging code I was putting in to figure out the problems. I have also been fixing compilation warnings, as well as handling a few TODO: notes that we…
April 27, 2010
Finished Skinning
At long last, I've figured out the issues with my file loader. To make a long story short, I was interpreting the bind pose and the animation poses to be in the same frame of reference. However, Milkshape uses the animations as deltas FROM the bind pose. So no bads on Milkshape,…
April 23, 2010
No More File Loading...
I have completely lost interest in writing a file loader for Milkshape3D files. After verifying that I am indeed loading the exact same values as a function model viewer (that can be downloaded from the Milkshape3D website) I am at a complete loss as to why the viewer proper…
April 20, 2010
MS3D Animation
After discovering that AssImp doesn't support MS3D files (at least in the build that I was working with) I decided to write my own loader for MS3D and wait for AssImp integration. However, since then I have been cursing Milkshape3D, since I have spent countless hours debugging proble…
April 01, 2010
Generalized Animations
Even though it took a ridiculous amount of time, I'm finally finished with my animation system. As I menioned last time, there are general classes and templates available now for any type of animation that I want to do (i.e. not just for skinning). I've still not written the…
March 22, 2010
Animation Streams
After getting the skinning system set up and functional with my scene graph last time, I came to the conclusion that I didn't really have a good, general purpose animation system set up yet. So I started out with some old interpolation code, and generated a few template classes to…
March 16, 2010
Vertex Skinning Functional
I've finally managed to get the vertex skinning operational. The changes needed to the parameter system were greater than I initially thought, since I wanted to keep a very simple interface for setting rendering parameters to be used in the shaders. In the end, I now all…
March 11, 2010
Vertex Skinning
It seems like it is taking ages, but I've finally made some progress on my vertex skinning system for Hieroglyph. It was a feature that I always wanted to add in, but never really got around to it until now. The basic system is currently implemented, but I still have to add support…
March 06, 2010
Ambient Occlusion Completed
I have two updates to make today actually. First off, I finished porting over my Ambient Occlusion sample from its previous DXUT implementation. This was one of the primary purposes for creating the engine in the first place, to allow an easier way to create demos for m…
March 03, 2010
Germany
I've managed to land in Germany, and make the drive from Frankfurt to Stuttgart on only a couple hours of sleep (I never sleep good on airplanes...). The whole production was quite a scene, as evidenced by the many stares we received in the airport - with my wife, 2 kids, and my dog, and ou…
February 25, 2010
Water Simulation in Hieroglyph 3
I'm only a few short days away from moving to Germany, so time has been at a premium for the past week or so. Even so, I managed to port my previous water simulation work over to Hieroglyph 3, and included it as a sample into the latest SVN repository.
Overall, I a…
February 22, 2010
Resource Proxies
Following up on my 'resource centric' discussions in the past, I've started the process of updating all of my resource references in Hieroglyph to use a proxy object instead of an integer index. In the past, I always used an integer index for a resource, and then an integer index f…
February 19, 2010
Hieroglyph 3: ViewFromTheWindow
After making some significant updates to the way that I manage my window classes, I put together a demo program that I have been thinking about for a while. I've called it the 'ViewFromTheWindow' and it is available in the Hieroglyph 3 SVN repository on codeplex.
As…
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