New and Improved Editor

I've banged my XNA-based level editor into shape with the new SharpDX-based graphics engine, and now have prop manipulation implemented!


click to enlarge

On the bottom there are two differently scaled copies of the same rock prop, and the (incredibly low-detail) rock bridge is another stand-in prop.  (It will still be in later, I just exported it from Blender as soon as it had a basic shape and texture coordinates.  I'm continuing to refiine it and create a proper texture for the mesh)  You can see the debug views of the deferred rendering targets across the top.  A rough cut of my ink-style outline shader is in use as well, though it could use some blur passes and tweaks to really be more what I was intending.

I've wanted to get this functionality in place ever since I first watched someone demoing the Hero Engine level editor a few years ago and realized how varied you can make a scene just by rotating and scaling a handful of props.

Someday soon I'll get the rest of my editor buttons in place :)

Forging ahead into DX11 : Lessons Learned

It's a good thing I'm not feverishly attached to any of the code I write, as I've probably scrapped entire sub-frameworks three times over in the process of building, then learning, then rebuilding my graphics and content pipeline with the SharpDX libraries.  I can definitely say XNA makes things neat and tidy for development, and I think I'll stick with it if there's anything in the near future I just want to hash together to prototype something.  At any rate, the good news is I've gotten back to where I was with XNA, only now it's built on a much cleaner framework with a newer underlying graphics API, and a snazzy deferred-rendering pipeline with a handful of associated flexible utility classes for multiple-render-target functionality.

The main intent of this post is to try and help out those people trying to move from XNA into a lower-level yet still managed graphics library.  What follows after the jump is some of the things I had to replace and rebuild once I pulled the "using Microsoft.XNA" statements from my code.  It's mostly a high-level look, I'll go into more depth (and more code) on specific issues down the line.

Heightmaps!

Just got heightmaps working, thought I'd post up the first-ever in-development screenshot of Hazard Pay:

And yes, that IS a photoshop brush artifact in the source bitmap.  That's how you know it's genuinely unfinished.  Totally on purpose.  Yup.

Cameras, shaders, and input oh my?

Lots of work being done on the rendering portion of the game's engine (which is really just an engine insomuch as it sits in a separate project that is referenced by my actual game project, so it's content-unaware).  Almost done coding up the camera so that it swaps in before- and after-effects dynamically.  The framework for deferred rendering is already in place, which means lots of fun shader programming down the line.

I dove in to the graphics pretty early as the sooner I could get visual feedback, the more enjoyable the rest of the coding could be, and the better momentum I could keep on the project.

Elsewise the engine just has stubbed-out managers for other systems (AI, physics, world resource content) and an input handler so I could use controls to roam around the gamespace.

Currently working on: implementing a heightmap for level terrain with 4-texture blending.  Once I get that done, I'll be happy to start throwing in screenshots, but right now the entire project just renders a  spaceship from an open-source shader demo.