New Features

The engine now uses VBOs (Vertex Buffer Objects) almost exclusively aside from the use of display lists as a fall back option (for < OpenGL 1.5 graphics hardware) and for rendering FreeType fonts. I've also re-wrote some of the texture support code to support both 24-bit and 32-bit files as well as RLE compressed files.

Blender and Python Scripts

Today I've started work on a really basic model format that I can use within the game. The biggest problem I've found with getting this task done is writing the exporter plug-in for Blender. Initially I was trying to make my model file sizes as small as possible by exporting in a binary format, but after several hours of crawling through Python and Blender API documentation I decided to stick with just writing to an ASCII file.

A 507 vertex model exports with a file size of 15KB which I suppose is quite a lot considering all it contains is raw vertex data and nothing else (I still have to add normal, and texture coordinate data). If anyone has had any success with writing a small exporter script for Blender I'd be interested to hear how you went about it.

V-Sync and PFNWGLSWAPINTERVALFARPROC

Another problem I'm experiencing is with getting wglSwapIntervalEXT() to work. On some occasions when I run my application the FPS caps at 75fps and calling wglSwapIntervalEXT(0); will disable V-Sync and send the FPS counter upto around 550fps -- pretty normal. However, on other occasions the fps will cap at 65fps and any attempt to disable V-Sync through the necessary extension fails. Any Ideas?