Tuesday Progress

Prototype Fun

The prior evening was something of a success with no real roadblocks. I now have some new commands INSTANCE STAMP, INIT INSTANCE STAMP and FREE INSTANCE STAMP which usurps an innocent object and causes it to activate a new feature of a DBP object to render a series of meshes based on reference data passed in from an instance object through the INSTANCE STAMP command.

Right now it still uses the internal DrawMesh command which essentially draws the parents mesh in a different location based on the reference data, but my task this evening will be to delete this in favor of a brand new piece of code which writes the DirectX buffer creation and staging code up from scratch to only service the features I want.

Features I Want

The first feature is to draw some polygons on the screen at the location representative of the instance object reference data passed in. Not too bothered about shaders, textures, render states, performance or memory usage right now, I just want to 'replace' the existing draw system with a new one which renders a polygon in the right location.

Once we have that, it will be possible to then break this up to use multiple buffers (one per shader/texture) and accumulate the polygons within an area to be rendered.  From this we can then do a realistic memory and performance test and figure out whether it's worth doing all the rest, or just revert to some instance object style approach.

In Other News

I appreciate the graphics and videos have been thin on the grounds since I have been banned from releasing crappy videos, so let me enlighten you with a new video produced from the recently built quality-control building located in Rickville. While I have been coding maddening memory stuff, Mark has been creating cool character stuff and here is something he prepared earlier:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUJXW8F6j0c&feature=youtu.be


In Other Other News

As a little trumpet blowing moment, I wanted to add that the AGK apps I wrote at the start of the year and quite brutally distracted me from Reloaded are doing very well in the charts for both iOS and Android.  There are about six versions floating about, but here are the Hazard ones:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/hazard-perception-uk-driving/id609649044?mt=8
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.focusmm.dts_hazard

I am really happy with how they came out, and it was all thanks to AGK (http://www.appgamekit.com) which allowed me to create the apps very quickly from scratch and then get it onto Windows, iOS and Android in a few clicks. I have now handed the project over so that iMac and Blackberry versions can be produced which will mean my range of Driving Test apps cover all the main distribution points with the possible exception of Windows 8. The aim is to get them into the top ten for both iOS and Android Educational charts, and with the quality of the apps compared to ALL the competition put together, they should manage that very easily ;)

Signing Off


Back to Reloaded, hopefully the new render system will not take 2 months, but I have a long way to go to even get back to the visual level we already had with classic, but I think it will be worth the wait if the theory lines up roughly with the practice.  In my latest proto, I pasted 800,000 object references and my memory usage did not even get past 300MB. True it was all the same mesh, but you get the idea ;)