just bored to death and was wondering how many of you have written 3d software rendering engines? i mean a real engine not a spinning wireframe cube or something and not using a D3D software device or something, that doesn''t count! (no offense of course cause they can be nice too, just not what i''m looking for) yes i''ve used direct3d and openGL quite a bit but there''s something magical (tear comes to eye) about doing it all yourself. i''m working on one now which is coming along very nicely for the week or so i''ve been working on it. ah now what i could accomplish with an artist, designer and another couple programmers. Anything you want to say about your experience or even good related sites would be cool. just tell me stuff about what your past/present engines include.. or is it only me that really gets a kick of out writing something so amazing from scratch?

I went through the ''Flights of Fantasy'' (Lambert?) book back
in ''94. Learned to hate Painter''s alg. Ended up
learning a lot sticking in z-buf. I remeber getting
that horizon working right. I then made a small game where the camera followed behind a running man. You controlled the man with the keyboard and the camera with the mouse. I think back now and realize I implemented a full bones system!

Later went through Hook''s book as a reference. Did
perspective correct texturing myself though, along
with a color lookup table to allow texture shading in
8 bit color.

I agree, doing a software engine really makes a person
understand the techniques and speed issues better.

cool.

i''ve written a quite a few from scratch. this new one was really planned out though compared to them.
as of yet it''s hasn''t had a ton of time into it but it''s going nice. full 6 DOF, only affine texure mapping as of yet, the ability is there to do lightmapping but first i''m need to write a perspective texture mapper w/ multi texturing.

i''ve implemented octrees (haven''t actually used them yet though). i''ll see how that works out and if need be switch to BSP or kd-trees. is precalulating and storing the PVS in octrees or kd-trees doable, that would be an awful lot of data in high poly count areas?

hmm what else. i''m looking into having support for using a hardware rasterizer. it shouldn''t be difficult since the engine was designed with portability and flexiblity in mind. it consists of a few layers which make it rasterizer and OS independant.

once i get that stuff done there''s not much more that needs to be done just for the basic graphics engine. offhand i can only think of fog (in software, probably not worth it) and curves. maybe non-cheesy lens flares. anything else i''m missing?

oh, and adding some file format readers for importing scenes. ahh so many plans, so little damn time

hmm, well that''s certainly less than the response i expected

ya exactly. finding something new out is like "damn that''s cool". good luck with it.

-werdup-