Phoenix Rising

Well, it took almost 4 years of constant setbacks and delays, but we finally have a working 64k engine again. And this one is good. Also it turns out we still enjoy staying awake for two days straight to finish a production, so I expect this tool to see some decent action in the years to come.

Conspiracy is back!

Almost there

2 hours until the deadline and we have a working build of the engine that renders the intro without glitches. And it's 50 kbytes. It really looks like we might finally be back. Rejoice!

Deadline Rush

29 hours until the deadline and with the last two days of insane work the tool can now be considered feature complete. Tonight will be spent writing post processing effects, updating the minimalengine and polishing the UI for Zoom. We're getting close!

BANANA!

Well, this is it. We're getting very close to the party and Zoom has been working with the tool for a few days now. The feature requests and small things to polish keep flooding in, nothing major up to this point. However he did note that working with the new tool is excellent. An honest-to-god praise that validates all the work I put in this thing :) I still need to finish the postprocessing support tonight so we can have the usual quality of visuals, but we're finally getting there.

Also, Banana!

Polishing, Round 1

Now with the whole production pipeline functional to some extent I started going back to finish the missing pieces. First stop is the keyframer as it only had very basic functionality before. It's starting to get to a useful state slowly.

Production ready

We have a standalone player! It came out at 25 kbytes with everything included (a 2 kbyte project file too), which is a lot better than the last engine we had. Still it's far off from my original goal so I'll keep working on it later. Now, back to polishing the keyframer.

Export

Started work on the exporter for the minimal binary format. It's not as trivial as I'd like it to be, but hopefully by the end of the weekend we'll have a standalone executable that can run demos from the current tool output. I'm quite curious how the size will turn out.

CUT!

Aaaand the timeline is alive. From this point on we can create a basic flyby release.

Movement

The keyframer came alive today. We can now animate stuff with some very basic tools. Basically all that remains to do is interface coding and hooking the keyframer into the material system. Tomorrow I'll do cameras so we can finally have a timeline event that renders a scene. That means that on a very basic level, tomorrow the tool will be production ready. Whoa.

Let there be light!

Turns out in order to properly start working with light I needed to first implement the basics of the animation system due to light information coming from scene data. This was an unforeseen delay, however it means that the basics of the keyframer are also in place now. Not long to go until I have a production ready tool!

Uncharted Waters

The current feature set is almost up to the level where the last iteration failed. Everything is stable and is working perfectly. Tonight I'm starting work on the keyframer, the last missing puzzle piece before we can start working on a production.

Pixels!

After a week of work, pixels have appeared at the end of the rendering pipeline. The mesh generator from the previous iteration is working nicely in the new setting as well. Now let's see if I can pull off a proper UI for it.

Freedom

In a few months this attempt at a new demotool will be 4 years old. Progress has been slow, mostly owing to the fact that 3.5 years ago I restarted the university and focused all my energies on that besides work. Yesterday my freedom was finally restored. Exciting times ahead!