What I am looking for is the ability to use both animation import and new hardware supports such as T&L.
Will PowerRender support T&L in near future?
Ken
Will PowerRender support T&L in near future?
Ken
I am converting a game that I had been using Direct3DRM in over to PR 2.6. D3D had Animation sets, which saved me a lot of coding time because My game relies heavily on camera and character animations (it's a Final Fantasy 7 type deal...). I got 6 months into it and discovered that RM had no support for alpha blending/particles/etc. I tried figuring out how to mix D3D Immediate mode with RM to get the disired functionality, but it was taking me way too long to wade through the crappy Microsoft documentation. That's why I have turned to PR
2.6. It supports animation AND nice spec fx... And it is WAY more straightforward to use and understand than D3D was.
I do have one major suggestion for PR 3.0 though, based on this whole journey I've been taking through the world of 3d API's over the last 6 months. To put it simply: Better Documentaion for beginning users.
When I first tried to get PR to work, I ran into major problems getting anything to compile. I am experienced with large projects and like to think I know a little bit about how to compile and link them...and I have come to expect spending a bit of time figuring out how to link with a new lib and get something up and running. But since PR 2.6 had no instructions on which libs were neessary (i.e. ddraw, dinput, pr.lib, prgui.lib, winmm.lib) as well as some other confusing issues regarding the whole dinput stuff and some globals that PR wants to use, I almost gave up and never tried again. Luckily, I sat down one more time and, after several tedious hours and following the examples that are included with PR, I got it right.
I know it's almost advantageous not get TOO simplistic in the documentation... i guess it prevents people who aren't really ready to use PR from using it and swamping Chris with really basic questions. But I think that it should be a little more explicit for 3.0. I have only done a little with PR so far, but here are some early suggestions for better docs... these are general in nature, and really should be more specific, but i just don't have time to get into it here:
- More on getting your first PR app to compile and run (better organization of libs ?)
- More on textures/materials/shadetables/tables/alpha blending etc. and how to really use them. Define the terms and explain with some illustrations how it all comes together
- More suggestions about building and importing models with textures/ animations.
I hope this doesn't sound whiny... I just want to make it easier for some people because i know i'm about to go insane writing this game ! ;-)