I finished most features (no-pixel/vertex-shader + bumpmapping yet till i have the money to buy a Geforce3+) of MGFX and we are now developing our first game (temporary name="Blubb") ...
Support for Vertex-Morphing-Animations and Bone-Based Skinned-Mesh Animations
the physic and network engine is working in beta state
sadly OpenGL is unsupported at the moment (so linux/unix-support is only for the Game-Server at the moment) in favor of GFX-Speed (and Development speed ;D)
screenshots will come as soon as i got a Geforce3 with PixelShader+Bumpmapping ... or they will look outfashioned...
more later ............................ unfortunatly i dont have the time to develop till next University-Holidays (late summer)
Lightmap generator almost finished (including simple shadow generation)... (no spotlights) --> every mesh can have its own lights per animation-frame and generate its own lightmaps for each animation-frame
basic functions of the Application Database Manager in Visual Basic is finished and running ... final data is exported as simple system-independed txt files at the moment so its usable under every system (added a simple screenshot@screenshot section)
wrote a simple application-inern database
added some basic lightning (1 new simple screenshot available)
not many other news .... did alot of cleanups/updates and removed obsolet code ...
wrote garbage-collector thats working pretty good ...
engine itself is still at ~25.000 lines + ~1000lines of TransactSQL/Visual Basic code for application managemend
I decided to create an SQL-Database to Manage all the 3D-Objects with its Properties ... (for creating applications/games) Therefore I use Visual Basic to write the Database-Manager ... It will be distributeable to any Windows-System using the free developer version of MS-SQL-Server
So I created an Active-X OCX that is fully integrated in the 3d-engine-concept ...
Using that OCX i wrote a VisualBasic-3D-mgfx-Model Viewer with only 20 lines of Code !!!
the OCX can uses any PictureBox or Form as rendering-target
there are no new releases planned for this month cause the engine is in an unstable state
Game Object management was updated ...Waypoint Management for Objects implemented
Every Game Object can have sub objects now ... like rotating tires/propellers or particle systems like smoke etc
Every Game Object has a working bounding box that can be displayed too ... simple bounding box -collision for gameobjects is working 80% (box-in-box test not working 100%)
the Octree for the Map Engine is implemented now ... --> View Frustum Culling is working but has some errors ... (Box-In-Box test not working 100%)
a MapCalculator can precalculate these Octrees and save them to a special Map-File (.mgfxmap) (very big at the moment ... will get compression ...)
all in all its ~25.500 lines of code now in 115 .h/.cpp files
Updated Linux-Release Uploaded today :> ... still no sound (general sound doesnt work with my terratec sound card ...) ... rest almost exactly like in windows ...
Found out that some releases of the windows-test-application might not work without this file d3dx8d.dll (if u dont have dx8sdk installed) ... thx to nils :)
found out that d3d8-device creation will fail on old 3d-cards that dont support windowed 3d-acceleration well ... ogl should work ...
tested ogl myself on a intel celeron 400mhz + tnt ... worked fine@40 fps with current map ... also the big fontain was missing ... who knows why
this problem should be fixed now though ...
new opengl-renderer should have the black-color bug fixed now (on some gfx-drivers all objects were black) ...
Linux Support Added ... (whole engine compiles without probs on linux now)
Direct3D Support Added (no 3d fonts yet though)
changed all static loaded meshes to single VertexBuffers ... (index buffers are a riddle to me in D3D 8.0 but that gives a speed increase to all APIs (and memory usage increase atm too..)
changed all texture-files to uncompressed 24-bit-TGA (stable BMP support not available at the moment)
Reached the -->20.000<-- lines-of-code-mark today (exactly 20500 lines of code in 104 cpp/h files)
no linux support today in that update .>
Added own API-independent Texture-Mapped-Font ... (using a simple selfcreated bad looking charmap.tga (fixed courier))
Added Command line parameters for changing Renderer/Map/Sky ...look params.txt
Deleted the Misc3d library ... moved the stuff to graphicengine
GameEngine is ready for starting the game now ... GameObjects are managed completly own their own now (physics/speed), can be applied to CameraView or Lights... and consist of either mesh or particle systems ...
included simple collision detection (thats damn too slow without a real mapengine) ... deactivated by default
other bug fixes / updates ...
(tga-colors wrong sometimes and bmp-file support still broken)
direct3d and ogl work completly even well now ... choose it by command-line-parameter (d3d lightning disabled though ... cause its not really supported by the engine at the moment)
started the whole engine ... (after collectin experiences with my old non-modular engine rpg2 (which has still more features than the latest release of this one ... it includs Lightmap support+bsp what will move soon to mgfx)