Saturday, June 26, 2010

Where things are currently at...

The astute (or simply plain fast!) of you will have noticed that I recently made 2 updates and then deleted them quickly afterwards. In case anyone saw it and is wondering that it's a little weird, and just for the general info of everyone, here's where things are currently at.

After completing the render so far, I started working on the variable vertex stride matter. This isn't as straightforward as it might seem, and I fairly quickly got into a mess with state changes happening out of order and so on. So from there I backtracked and brought it up again, and while it worked in about 75% of cases, there was a small problem with static entities (only, which was odd) where they were flickering on and off every other frame, and a rather more serious problem where occasionally everything would turn into a weird inside-out tunnel effect that looked like you either had too many drugs or too little sleep.

These would be cool effects if they were intentional, but they weren't. Even more annoying was the fact that this was something I got working fine way back in 1.8.0 or thereabouts.

So now I've ripped things back to basics again and have been building up one step at a time - what I should have done first time around, I guess. This isn't so bad as it seems - the main renderer itself consists of only 3 short functions; everything else is just buffering up data and setting state.

Right now I'm at a stage where I have everything back to vertex buffers, but with the buffers re-initialized for every state change. This is a little wasteful; they only need to be reinitialized when the vertex format changes, so that's the next step. For that I'll be going back to 1.8.4 and checking out how I did it back then.

The good thing though is that I have the first mess I had gotten into definitively sorted now, as back then the very act of reinitializing the buffers caused things to go bad. So things are looking up a lot better than they had been these past few days, and I'm hoping to get a result with it soon.

That's about it till next time.

3 comments:

gnounc said...

Guess I'm not fast enough!
I only saw 1 of those overwritten updates.

mhquake said...

P0rn span deleted. :)

Hope you all got it before it was too late...!

BuzzKillington said...

damn! I missed it... lol