So I got a little bit derailed last night with the Bulls game which means tonight will be a bit of a crunch time. I have checked a few more items off the list since the last post so let's talk about those really quickly.
I've got my object culling working pretty well at this point. My sphere has been changing color as it passes through a sphere rather successfully for a while now and I finally got this code transferred over to the sphere object itself. I've inserted a check in the rendering and graphics objects files that essentially looks to see if the collision test passes and draws or doesn't based on the results. The weird thing about this one is that there isn't really an easy way to tell is it's working or not. I suppose that what the color change function accomplishes. I've also done some major cleanup on my files. They all had a few artifacts from older generations in terms of what was included and what was externally declared. I got rid of what wasn't necessary anymore and created a couple of header files to make the includes look nicer. It's looking pretty spiffy. I may need to take a run through my code and beef up some of the comments though.
I've only got a few real requirements left and then it's on to making improvements. First thing I'm going to tackle is the texture manager. for now I'm just going to get it running and hope for the best so I can get credit for it. I think if I were to be making my engine available for sale this manager would be virtually unseen to the user. I've been using the object manager to do the same work I'll have the texture manager do (load and delete textures) and I really like that as a simple interface. My object's calls to load or delete a texture will probably call the texture manager which will take care of counts and do the necessary actions and then return a pointer. beyond that I don't really see what it's going to need to do. It's not very robust and I've had some conversations with Ben (a classmate) about how to make something a little faster/more robust. He's clearly got a good sense for writing code that isn't going to break down. That should be the last requirement. I could technically start my demo right from there.
Then it's on to improvements. I'd like to add in a better means to get transformations applied to objects, or at least additional options. I think I'll make one function that takes a matrix and applies it directly to the object;'s transformation. I also like the options I have on the sphere, so I'll tweak those a bit and copy them over to my other primitives. In the future I could imagine just sticking some of them into the GraphicsObject class so that all future objects have the same basic functionality.
I'll likely improve the User interface to allow for the camera to do more than just pan left, right, forward and backward. but I'm not real sure on that one. This one will be an "if I have time" sort of thing.
This is a longer post but when I get it all written down it doesn't seem like tonight will be nearly as bad as I had originally thought. It's amaizing how far I've come in the last week or so. Let's get crackin'
-A
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