premake

I've finally decided to give premake a try. I know some people who are using it for existing projects, but I haven't had the chance to try it out myself. Today when thinking about starting a new, very small, command line project from scratch, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give it a try. So far it seems pretty easy to get a simple project up and running with it. We'll see how it goes when things start to get complicated. :)

Liquid Dream

My boss just wrote an article about the 5 coolest things this year and #4 is Liquid Desktop, which was my first project here at Stardock. I'm not sure its quite cool enough to make such a list, but the complement is appreciated. Anyway, for anyone wondering what I've been up to lately, check it out.

Coding on my personal project at home has grinded to a halt, but I still have plans to work on it and finish it someday. If / when I make any progress I'll be sure to post some updates.

Animation Testbed

Ketchup

... or catch up. Let's get up to date.

So the last major thing I talked about working on was the animation system and fixing the Blender exporter so that it exported proper DirectX files. Both of which I can proudly say are finished. Though I've had to return to the Blender exporter many times because it just doesn't work very well.

Once I finished the animation system I figured it was time to get some meshes for it to work with. So I then proceeded to implement a mesh system in the engine. There was some more work with the Blender exporter to get the mesh data exporting properly. I spent a lot of time writing tools to generate the binary files used by the engine. I ended up using Rex which is a Ruby version of Lex to scan the X file. I'm happy to say that I now have skinned and animated meshes in the engine. Still some small bugs but for the most part its complete and works as desired.

For now I've left that part of the engine alone and started on what I call the Layer Manager. It's a 2D system for handling overlays and menus. I'm still working on that system but it's coming along. I'll explain it in more detail in my next post.

New update coming soon

I promise I'll write a new post soon. I've been busy working on lots of stuff and I'll get everyone (anyone) up to speed on what I've accomplished recently and what's ahead.

Why no update

So I promised an update recently but it has been some what delayed due to the fact that I broke my kneecap and haven't been near my computer much. I have been working on some stuff but I won't be posting an update until sometime in the future. Until then.....

Updates coming soon.

Class ends this week and I plan to update the blog sometime this weekend, so keep a lookout.