Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Making Progress

It's been a little while since I posted things have definitely moved forward since my last post.

Planning for the new FPS engine is now complete as well as the new file format. I have almost finished writing a map converter which creates maps from a text file. The format of the map file is organized to speed up loading, collision detection as well as rendering. This part of the new engine should be much better than the previous engine particularly because I can now be absolutely sure that that the loading code does not contain memory leaks ( a major problem in the last version.). It is also much more modifiable/maintainable as I make additions to the rendering abilities of the engine.

I have implemented full 3d clipping, it is still a little buggy but works well. I will refine it further down the track. The new map file also contains light maps. While I am unsure if they are being correctly generated, it will be very interesting when I finally complete the rendering code to see how they show up.

Various optimizations discussed over at psp-programming have made it into the plan as well, hopefully I'll be able to not only make things look a bit prettier but also gain an increase in frame rate as well.

Ive got a few other feature concepts that I have in the works, although some are refusing to blend into my current plans easily. I'll comment on these a little further down the track.

Things are looking up :)