So some great news for me, the SharpDX Toolkit was released at the end of October, providing a clean high-level interface with DirectX11 similar to the XNA model, only not reliant on XNA support. I'm especially excited because it allows me to fall back on what is most assuredly a better-structured library than what I cobbled together while learning how to program a DirectX pipeline.
While this doesn't break my current code, it does give me a great foundation to make one final sweeping overhaul to the main engine/library to focus on a data-centric model. My existing code wraps a lot of data objects with personality and functions that really should just belong to an authoritative "Renderer" object, so I've started moving towards a design that simplifies my camera classes, effect libraries, and other infrastructure entities and makes them components of a primary Renderer. That renderer will work with a single source of world data and state data to render the entire scene (from world geometry to actors, UI, etc) appropriately for the gamestate.
The other impetus for cleaning up and officializing (is that a word?) my data components is interoperability with other sub-systems. My physics and AI managers are going to need to access subsets of the world data to do things like calculate navigation meshes and collision hulls based on a dynamic worldspace, as the players will be creating (and destroying) walls, buildings, nests, resources, and so on. Moving data management and world change responses into a singular "world manager" that can handle manipulation and access to a geometry and materials heirarchy will keep that organized and clean behind some simple interface calls.
So aside from the (I promised myself, final) design overhaul, I've been off in right-brain land honing my art chops before I start cranking out assets I actually want to use in the game. I'm pleased with the practice and progress, and should have some character sheets of the main characters (in their designer-blessed officialdome) available shortly, with environment shots to follow. Everybody loves some good concept art.
