Hi! Ive been working on a 3D game engine using DirectX10 for the past couple of weeks and ive. Its going to be a pretty basic engine, but i want to develop it as far as it can go for the next year or 2. And i was wondering, when developing an engine, is it good to have different vertex types and vertex layouts? For example... Having a vertex type called ColorVertex - for vertices that only have position and color. LitVertex - for vertices that contain normals and diffuse colors for lighting. texVertex - for vertices that will be textured. Im hoping that dealing with this now, might make the development process later a little bit easier! Thanks!

Definately yes.

But also allow for new vertex types to be added later - I'm sure you'll need them.

EG.

TexLitVertex1 - a lit vertex with a single texture

TexLitVertex2 - a lit vertex with 2 textures

Even "lit" is a bit vague - just diffuse, ambient ?, specular ? etc.

So it is good to have different vertex formats - even better if you can just plug in new ones as your needs change which I'm sure they will over time.

HTH

I'm mobile right now so I can't post any code but what I did was make it dynamic.
I read the format that the mesh file needs, build a 'fake' shader using a stringstream and then ask dx10 to create that input.
Then store it for lookup later on.