3DS Material Plug-in

Wow, 3 posts in a single month! Thanksgiving break has given me time to complete the model exporting portion of my 3D Studio Max plug-in utility. As you can see in the image to the left, I have written a custom material plug-in that allows you to create materials in a way directly usable by the engine, minimizing the amount of time and potential bugs that go along with creating textures and materials for game objects.

Working with MaxScript to create the plug-in is actually pretty simple. This site was a pretty nice starting point for figuring out where to start with creating the plug-in, and the MaxScript documentation itself is not half bad. I'll likely write up a tutorial on how I went about creating the plug-in at some point in the future, as some parts of it are not so obvious as others. With this, I no longer have to manually code little debug primitives to test things, so I'm quite excited about moving forward to getting the actual game started.

And yes, to answer the question, that is the Yuna model from FFX-2, and Rikku from FFX. They just happened to drop in to help me test my plug-in and make sure things integrate smoothly into my engine. The models came from a place that no longer exists (I believe), so I can't really offer a link to where you might find them, but I'm sure they're still available in some forgotten corner of the internet. . .

Attack of the clones!

In my attempts to post a little more consistently, this is a miniature progress update. The latest feature to grace the DM3D Engine: The ability to clone scene nodes and resources. The image here was generated using only primitives and the clone functionality, creating a nice (physically impossible) stack of boxes that all properly share mesh, texture, and shader resources. I am currently working on revamping and extending the 3D Studio Max plugin I began working on back in July. Once this is finished, I will be able to finally begin work on my special version of Pong. Hurrah!

Materials, textures, and models

Finally getting back into the groove of life after all of the big changes that have happened recently. I have next to no time to work on this project these days, but that doesn't stop me from putting in an hour or two whenever I get the chance (which seems to be maybe once a week or so). Anyhow, in the time since my last tech-related post I've completely revamped the way meshes are loaded and the way materials and textures are handled and I really like how nice it has become.

I've also updated the engine to be initialized using an XML config file, which makes setting things up nice and easy. Getting the window created, mesh, textures, and shaders loaded, and everything rendering is done in just a dozen or so lines of code. With my lack of free time I may be moving a little slowly, but I am getting somewhere. Stay tuned for more updates.