Thanks to Scott, we've got the star halos working right. Check this out. I
think we're all set with the demo graphics now.
I was notified by Cari that we're leaking memory like a sieve. Time to fix
that. No doubt the scene graph isn't being cleaned up properly. Ugh. I'll start
looking into optimizations after that. There are few I know I want to do.
- Support for temporary objects
I don't want to stick laser shots and explosions in the main scene graph.
They're too dynamic.
- Mesh manager
We're loading the same mesh more than once now. We've already got a manager
for textures and it's working out great. This will also increase our load
time.
- Put the planets right way up
If you've noticed from the other screenshots, the planets are on their sides.
- Planet lighting
The Art Czar wants the planets really dark. Essentially only lit by the
stars.
Going through the memory leaks, I determined that I HATE the Microsoft
D3DXFRAME architecture for a scene graph. Maybe a scene graph is an improper use
of the frame. Anyways, I"ve decided to make one more drastic change to the scene
graph. I'm going with a true tree format. Check out the differences.
Frames (modeled after D3DXFRAME)
Tree
The main difference between the two is in maintainability. With
the tree, each node only knows about its first sibling and its first child. In
the tree format, each node only knows about its children. Notice that there
aren't any arrows that connect the grid and game layers. This is the way it
should be. When you remove a node, you don't have to worry about the rest of the
graph. Just remove the node and your done.
Changed the scene graph and the lights are broken again. What's
up with that? Why are they so darn finicky? Time to break down and spend a
couple hours debugging. Ugh... I hate that. It turns out that there's been a bug
in the system all along. Some of our objects weren't setting their material.
That's been fixed now and I'm going to check in my stuff.
After bastketball, the Art Czar hijacked me and made planet
lighting the #1 task next. Not too bad. I wanted to do it anyways. Here's the
mockup of the lighting he'd like to see:
I think we can definately get there. It might take some per
pixel lighting which I think can only be done in shaders. Here's our first crack
at it:
Notice the jaggies on the planet. We thought we'd minimize those
by upping the tri cound. Here's our second try:
The jaggies are smaller, but still not what we want. I"ll have
to do some more work on it. It might have something to do with the normals, but
I'm not sure. We're toying with the idea of making this a texture operation with
a light map. That would be fine and the artist can adjust the the fade. That'll
take some research into texture transforms to keep the light side oriented
towards the star while the planet turns. That may be the best way to go because
it's relatively low CPU and it'll work on low poly models.
Kris, another talented artists, gave me an asteroid. Wanna see
it?
That turned out great. Wouldn't you like to see that in the
game. I'm sure we can come up with a use for it 
Well, I"m off to check in my stuff finally and then we have the
GalCiv chat tonight. I'll probably try to knock off more tasks from the short
list above, but I think I"ll mostly take it easy. Gotta get rested for
Homeworld2 tomorrow
