Ray Picking In The EngineAfter spending a bit of time to get it right, I have successfully integrated ray picking into the Hieroglyph 2 engine. Overall, it is great to finally get it in since I have been wanting to do it for a while now. To commemorate the implementation, I whipped together a demo that would highlight an object in the 3D scene when the cursor is over it. Unfortunately, the windows cursor doesn't show up on the D3D9 surface when I took the screen shot [rolleyes] (does anyone know if there is a way to have the cursor show up???) but I wanted to share it anyways:



3D GUI up nextWith that implemented, I have moved on to working on improving my GUI implementation. From the start of Hieroglyph 2, I have wanted to get an actual 3D object to serve as components of the GUI. Ray picking is one of the required parts of doing that, so there was a bit of alternate motives behind getting it into the engine (subconsciously adding features to make yourself happy...).

There are several benefits to doing this even besides the coolness factor. By using 3D objects for the gui, I can use my existing material rendering and spatial hierarchy for the GUI. Normally, a 2D GUI requires at least a little bit of special case rendering - it certainly must be different than the rest of the scene rendering. I am quite interested to see how functional this whole thing turns out to be - it should be quite a departure from my own 2D GUI from Hieroglyph 1, and I'm fairly excited about it. More pictures to come as I make some real progress on it!