A concept is born

Today an idea got stuck in my head. You know, the sort that won't let you be still until it's realized. It's not that original or anything, but to do a proper 64k release like that... Well let's just say I finally have something to work towards - and this always helped me a lot with previous projects.

Whoops

Well Assembly is here and meanwhile the development was halted due to a number of things, mostly to do with work and me realizing a few issues with the old engine. This made me reconsider rushing into the design of a new one without thoroughly thinking things through first. We'll get there though, if not this year then the next!

Materials

We decided to move on and start implementing new systems instead of getting the texgen perfect.
The system that will be the heart of the engine is the material system, so I'm starting with this. I'm cutting out all the unused things based on my previous engine, we never used most of it anyways.

The renderstate set I'm using will be fairly simple: the full set of alpha blend, blend operators, alpha testing (I might trade this for a shader implemented solution, but using the renderstate feels like a better choice for 64ks) and cull modes.

I still need to figure out a good solution to one of the biggest design flaws in our old engine, hopefully the next post will be a description of the problem and the solution.

Work delays

Didn't really have time this week to work on the project - was too busy with work. I hope to remedy this over the weekend by fixing the texgen interface.
I did look a bit further ahead into the more complicated aspects of bezier splines, but that research might be a dead end. More on this when I get to animation.

Interface fail

Today I hit the first red light design-wise. The graph like operator interface is a mess compared to operator stacking. However opstacking would make a mess of the generator code, just like last time.
I'll try a hybrid approach, hopefully that'll work.

Import

Finally I have some form of completely working functionality with the first import function finished. No UI or anything like that for now, I just load a file on init and store it again on deinit, but it seems to work. Further testing is needed tho.
I decided to globalize the identification of resources by using GUIDs, the concept works great for the texture filters. Our old engine suffered from lots of project merging problems due to the lack of a system like this.

Export

Progress has been slow over the weekend, but I finally came up with a system that can possibly fix all our previous problems with multiple people working on the same project at once. The exporter works and seemingly exports good data, now all I need to do is import it back.