My first task upon opening up the Rawr solution in Visual Studio 2008 (yay upgrade) was to try and fix the issues that were plaguing poor Boney. My main problem with fixing the skeletal animation code is that, for one thing, my understanding of skeletal animation is pretty barren. The other thing is that, to the best of my understanding, I adhered to the MD5 format specs that I was going off of through the code-writing process very closely. I couldn't figure out what would be causing the animation to look so wonky. So I did what I always do when I need to fix something that I'm clueless about: I play with things until I hit a segment of code that seems to directly impact what I'm trying to change. This process led to Boney as envisioned by Picasso:
For a bit of a break from those precious thirty minutes of work I spent on Boney spread across five days I figured I'd write up an X format file importer since that seems like a neat thing to do at the time. This format is a complete and utter pain in the ass to load in outside of D3DX and IDirectXFile. If I'm feeling particularly verbose and bored at some point the future I'll probably write up an article about my experiences with it, but I'm not really expecting such a time to ever exist. Here some screenshots from the rendering experiences with tiny.x after I had the file reading in correctly:
As far as I can tell, I have a serious case of long-term ADD. After a couple of days of working with the X format and getting the basic mesh rendering correctly I jumped back to getting Boney's skeletal animation to a workable state. Following a suggestion from jpetrie I added some code to render mesh bones/joints along with the mesh itself and it seems fairly obvious now what I'll have to fix when I get home later tonight:
