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!

Reset

Well, here we go again.

Threw out the complete code a little more than a year ago as it started to crumble heavily due to the lack of a proper basecode. Spent the most of last year away from coding because of real life (tm), but managed to pull together a pretty decent standalone codebase for future projects. Migrated to DX11, built a brand spanking new UI engine on top of this during the summer (complete with XML+CSS based UI editing for easy customization) and started writing a test application for it by implementing the UI of the discontinued tool (as good a test as any).

Well the current iteration of the texture generator is almost fully functional, some cosmetic changes and special features still need to be implemented (image import, text output, etc) and I finally figured out a way to implement Subroutine support. I'm dying to see what the gfx guys will do with this. I'm committed to doing this properly this time around :)

Growing

Implemented the most complex mesh generator in any of my tools to date - it takes up a whopping 5k of space compressed, but the results should be worth it. No pictures until I have something really cool to show. Also found a few bugs in the material export/import stuff and addressed those.

Color Picking

Here's one thing that never came up until we saw it in the Farbrausch tools: a proper color picker. Well, we have one now. :)

Storage

Finished putting together a portable archive format for the tool. Should help a lot by keeping all the project files in one place when not working in an SVN repo.

Opensource

It's an opensource pandemic!
Farbrausch, Moppi, and now us too have released tool code into the wild. Not this one tho, as it's still in the works... But who knows, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea once there was a release with it :)

Also, I made some progress on a project file format that will enable projects to be a lot more portable than in their current mult-file state. The current version will also still be kept for svn based teamwork of course.

Refactor

Last weekend marked Breakpoint Revision 2012, and watching the stream gave me some motivation to refactor lower parts of the engine code that made me stop the project again back in august. Damned diamond inheritance issues. Now that that's out of the way I'll be able to move forward with the project slowly, once the deadline rush at work and the exams clear up.