Brussells Development Blog

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve updated the ol’ site but I come bearing lots of updates to Piston3D. Since the last writing I have added just some of the following I can remember off the top of my head:

• Basic Scene Graph ( Includes AABB Frustum Curling )
• HLSL Diffuse\Specular Lighting
• Basic GUI System ( Form, Labels, etc. )
• Render to Target ( Dramatic FPS gain in GUI system so far )
• AABB on all Scene Objects for fast Curling in Scene
• First Person Camera Implementation
• Basic Event System ( Input, Windowing Events, etc. ) coupled with Listeners

Well below is 2 screenshots, in the first you can see a basic GUI system which is first rendered to a Target ( dynamic texture ) then until any states change that texture is rendered on a simple 2 primitive box representing the owning form. Also shown is a simple Torus model with Diffuse + Specular lighting that I started with HLSL. Take notice of the Vertice & Face count numbers in the first screen shot. Now in the 2nd screenshot you will notice the torus is no longer drawn, I actually moved the view and now when looking at the Vertice & Face counts you will see a dramatic drop b\c the AABB Frustum Curling system I’ve implemented so far in the Scene Graph system quickly cut it out with very little over head. I will implement more advance Sphere Curling calculations as I move forward and so on, this is just a dirty test of my theories and knowledge thus far and it appears to be working rather well =). Did I mention the whole project thus far is modular in design and API Graphic Independant =). But I only have DirectX 9.0c and HLSL implemented thus far.

  

Suprise, suprise, I’m back from the dead it appears =). Just thought I’d come in and blow some dust off the site and get back to posting some more. I have been busy lately, other things ( real life ) has pulled me away from spending time on my sites over the past few months but hopefully I can find time now to post a little more and get some good, juicy tutorials up.

I’m still coding away on Piston3d ( C++ DirectX / OpenGL Game Engine ). In fact I have a screenshot of one of my latest tests showing off some very early workings of the Programmable Pipeline ( Shaders ) system in action. Gotta thank Brad Harris for the famous Teapot model that I’m testing with there =p. It may be hard to see but I was playing with some simple lighting effects in that pic, the white areas of course being the lit sections.

So far I have a nice system layout utilizing some of the following features:

• * Explicit C++ structure for crossplatform, cross-Render API targeting
• * Font System
• * Programmable Pipeline ( Shader system )
• * Basic Mesh and Submesh rendering
• * Importing of 3DS files
• * Reading and handling of PNG textures

I see a lot of questions asking how to set a report to show in landscape mode verses normal mode. It’s actually easier than you would expect. Simply view the properties of the Report Object, and modify the Page Size setting to read 11 x 8.5 inches as shown below.

Now save and preview in Print Mode. You should notice that your report appears to be in Landscape mode ( wider than higher ) so when a user views the report or hit’s print his default mode is set to Landscape. Easy as pie.

Enjoy !,
Brandon Russell