Today I worked on skinning. Skinning is the term used for 3D bone-based animation, and comes from the idea of putting "skin" on the bones.

My initial plan for skinning was to store all of the joint matrices for each model instance in one big texture. The advantage to this is that I can fit a lot m…

MS3D model geometry is now loaded correctly. One problem I did encounter was that the models are stored in a right-handed coordinate system, but the game uses a left-handed coordinate system. This means that the x coordinate is pointing in the wrong direction, basically. I initially tried to…

We use Milkshape3D for modeling, so it makes sense to support loading .ms3d model files. I implemented basic loading code this morning, but it needs a lot of work. In its current state, it will only load a single triangle out of the model, and materials and animation are not taken into accoun…

I finally have the anti-cheat shader working! These are the results (you may need to increase your monitor's brightness to see the difference, as this is what the shader is designed to combat):


The first screenshot is the original, the second is the corrected version.

Ironically, I kind of cheated…

I spent most of the day trying to get the anti-cheating shader to work. I still don't have it working quite right, but it's getting closer. The idea is to create worse and worse banding the darker something is, thus blurring any details. I am able to create banding just fine, but making it v…

I worked on the rendering system today. Because of the way I handle errors, there is a class for the D3D object, the device, vertex declarations, vertex buffers, vertex shaders, and pixel shaders. This is a little inconvenient, as the following code shows:

m_renderer->GetDevice()->BeginSc…

Today I worked on the systems. Like I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, I have decided to take a reference counting approach to this problem. My original thought was to create and destroy the systems from within the application layer, and share these with the game states. With the new desi…

[size="3"] Cellular Automaton

I learned a new term this morning: "Cellular Automaton". It's basically a grid where something can be in each grid cell and the state of that something depends on certain rules about the surrounding grid cells (its neighborhood).

An example of cellular automaton be…

Getting back into coding after a few weeks leave was a bit rough, but I managed to get the windowing and some basic game state code in place.

My plan is to split the code up into the following layers: Main, App, Systems, and Game State.

The main layer is pretty much just WinMain(). It handles the c…

If you want to learn HLSL, I highly recommend ShaderX2: Intro & Tutorials, specifically the article "Introduction to the DirectX High Level Shading Language". The book, along with a couple of the other ShaderX books, has been made available for free over at http://tog.acm.org/resources/shad…