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.

I thought I would drop the news of what I have been up to lately behind the scenes in programming. I’m currently working on starting up my own Software company on the side. This blog will be the first mention on this new company that I’m calling IronWorks Software. I have a domain up and a base website just up for place holding till I get some of my work done to showcase and offer on it. The website can be found here: http://www.ironworkssoftware.com/.

One of the first pieces of a possible product that might be found offered on it is a pure Win32 Menu system for developers to use. It’s different in that this menu system is built from the ground up using straight OS API access for speed and durability. So far the feature list is far too much to write here and much of it is going to be re-worked before release I’m sure. I have a peek at this new component in action in a win32 test program.

I haven’t ironed out the name of this new component ( “ironed out” heh, no pun intended ). So I’ll just call it IronMenu for now.

Enjoy,
-Brandon

Today I managed to get some small tasks ( yet important ones ) taken care of. In preparations for moving Sumiton Fire and Rescue over to this dedicated box, I finally got my email server installed and properly configured. The longest part was probably configuring the Webmail portion of the server. My IIS and ASP.Net 2.0 didn’t go over well with this slightly older version of email server software, which wanted ASP.Net 1.1.

After some tweaking, and old school manipulation ;p … I got it to finally take. Now I have a email server with good Spam blockage, Virus Scanning, and a versatile Webmail site that can easily attach to those sites I wish to give email functionality to.

So far so good, just one step closer to moving over the Fire Dept. site. Although, the major things left still lie with me finishing up the ASP.Net 2.0 coding I have left to do. This will be the 3rd major over haul for the site within a 5 year span. Not too aweful bad, considering it’s staying on the cutting edge of what software and servers have to offer.