Journal Facelift

Okay, so after copying KGodwin's css code (tnx!) and spending way too much time messing around with colours and stuff, now my journal looks much more spiffy. Yay for shallow sparklies!

Engine Progress

Haven't posted any new screenies in a while[crying]. Been happily churning through the afore-mentioned rendering update for vertex buffer batching. Got a nice superclass up and running for creating various types of vertex buffer object. This class will store vertex data as it's loaded/tesselated, then once the vertex counts are high enough, it'll whack 'em into a vb for drawing. The object then collects "drawing calls" every frame and only actually draws when it gets a flush command (after all the visible objects have submitted their calls). This way, I change vertex buffers as few times as possible (each vb only gets used once per frame). Previously I was keeping one vb per object and just drew that every time my draw function needed to. Currently I just have one type for terrain objects, but later I'll add more for characters/entities/whatever.

Otherwise, just been doing a bit of cleaning up and converting some older code to use the STL instead of fun 'ol dynamic arrays.

Knowledge For The New Year

I've known for a long time that I am woefully clueless when it comes to the art of shaders. I've been trying to avoid having to touch them for as long as possible, but now that the engine is creeping towards something decent, I should bite the bullet and learn some of the techniques. I'm not sure that I want to be a wizard in this department, I'm just looking for that sweet-spot where I'm not just copying-and-pasting other ppl's code; I actually understand what's going on and can make some of my own customizations. In aid of this (and some more all-round knowledge/reference), I've bought myself the following books:

1) 3D Game Engine Design, Second Edition: A Practical Approach to Real-Time Computer Graphics (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive 3D Technology).
2) GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-Performance Graphics and General-Purpose Computation.
3)Game Programming Gems 6 (Book & CD-ROM).

The game engine one is mainly just for all-round (am I doing this a stupid way) reference material and the Game Programming Gems series is one I've always thought I'd like to thumb through, but I've never bothered to buy before.

Anyway, if anyone's had some good/bad experiences with these, it's too late to prevent/affirm my purchases, but please share all the same!