Diffuse + Specular Lighting, and AABB Frustum Curling …

Posted on September 29, 2008 by B.Russell

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.

  

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Back from the Dead …

Posted on June 12, 2008 by B.Russell

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
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Adobe CS3 Install Problems

Posted on August 24, 2007 by B.Russell

Well I’m sure many of you have at least heard about CS3 if you haven’t already obtained a copy for use. But many out there, including me, have had nothing but problems with installation(s) of CS3. We use it here at work and let me tell you, one computer will install with ease, and the next 2-3 will bomb every time.

Some tips and steps I have learned the hard way myself over the past few weeks.

1.) If you bomb before even launching the installer, or weird exits with no notice you can try this. NOTE: I was on Vista when these happened. You can launch a command prompt (DOS) with Administrator rights, this is important. Get into your Windows\System32 directory and use the following 2 commands.

> regsvr32 jscript.dll
> regsvr32 vbscript.dll

2.) If you get all the way through the installer only to find at the end only a few common apps installed but the core apps selected failed. Then you may have the problem I have been seeing which involves Error Code 2, and many others. TIP: you can find your error codes in the log files contained in your c:\program files\common apps\adobe\installer. You’ll see a zip file there which contains the log files. Now the process I did may not work for you, it seems to be a hit or miss but I’ll go over every process I did to get it to finally work.

  • * Uninstall all Adobe applications from the Add\Remove Programs section in your Control Panel. Yes I know, a bit drastic but you can try leaving some if you have the patients to sit there for all the repeat processes to figure out how to fix it.
  • * Download the Adobe CS3Clean script. Search Google for the link to it on the Adobe Site. NOTE: You may have to download the Microsoft Windows Install Cleaning program to get it to work.
  • * Run the script, I used the un-documented Method (4) when prompted. It only shows 2 options, but trust me there is Method 3 and 4 you can use, 4 being nuke anything with Adobe in it’s name off my system.
  • * Repeat last step a couple times to make sure everything is in fact gone, Vista can be a little quirky with this sometimes.
  • * Now heres the kicker ! I had to turn off all virus scanning and firewall software. I have McAffee  so I manually turned it all off, then went into Task Manager and manually stopped all processes that are not system core ones required to be running.
  • * Once I did all the above I basically had a flawless install.

Hope all this helps you, I know it was a lot hours\days of figuring it out for myself but I eventually just followed my above steps and got it working every time.

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