Yesterday I made it so that you could control the pitch, heading, and roll of your ship using the mouse and cursor keys. Pitch and heading adjustment works fine, but roll is dependent on the direction that your ship is facing; I actually suspect that the other two have similar problems as well…

A skybox is used to add a background to a 3D scene. Things which are so far in the distance that they can be drawn into a 2D texture, such as the sun, distant mountains, and unmoving clouds, are part of the background. It is literally a box with the camera at its center. As the camera moves,…

You can now look around the cockpit using the mouse.

In order to get the mouse's relative movement, I used raw input. After I have the relative movement vector, I multiply it by the mouse sensitivity and multiply that by the rotation speed. This gives the final angular velocity vector which I …

Today I finally managed to get the cockpit model into the game. I've decided to use the fixed function pipeline this time rather than shaders; it's probably a good idea to be experienced with both.

To use FFP (fixed function pipeline) lighting, you first need to fill in a D3DLIGHT9 structure. T…

While doing some further research into the relation between a graphics API and the graphics driver, I came across this article: Mode Switching. I recommend reading it if you are interested in the things I discussed in the previous blog post.

I spent most of the day in research, mainly into the way …

While working on the model loading code, the compiler complained about fopen() being deprecated. These warnings aren't new, but I've been wondering for a while what exactly caused the functions to become deprecated. So after a Google search I found myself at the MSDN reading "Security Enhance…

The first thing I did today was the removal of the initialization game state, replacing it with the systems layer. The "systems layer" is a collection of objects/systems common to all game states. Examples of these are the main window, Direct3D device, and timing system. Currently the system…

Today I finished up the basic windowing code. The window procedure is contained in a window manager, which also handles registering the class and creating the window.

I also did some research into the definition of RAII to try and work out what I should be calling a particular technique I have b…

Most of today's work was spent in researching airplane controls for the new test project. I don't have much to say on the matter, but here are a couple resources which may be of interest: