| 2003-01-29 | A milestone is reached. The editor now imports GeoSpatial data, triangulates it, decimates it and puts it onscreen (image in screenshots). Now that I have this basic functionality done the majority of the complexity has been conquered. The rest is all polishing and maturing the source-code. |
| 2003-01-28 | Put another screenshot up showing GeoSpatial Data being imported into the editor. I hope to finish this end of this week. Then I wish to start working on terrain-editing features. Vertex transformation, face splitting, vertex insertion, etc. Ugly tasks that need to be done. Then already I have some thoughts on having a texture pool. From this pool, editors will select the textures to apply to the faces of the landscape. As soon as the basic vertex/face manipulations are in place and the texturing, I have to start thinking about a file-format for export and import into my real renderer. Initially that will be just a utility to test the render library (it'll all be integrated with the BSP renderer and handle different render contexts, effectively I'll be able to merge scenes together which is part of the objective ). Takes some time, my estimation is that it's gonna be about 2 months to get this full pipeline going... |
| 2003-01-26 | Not a lot of news for today. I've incorporated face-picking in the editor, so that
individual faces can be selected and its vertices/colors/textures modified easily. Then I
decided the editor is not much without some import functionality, so I integrated the
GDAL library. This is a library that allows me to work with GeoSpatial data, so that I can
load in elevation data from a variety of file formats. Another thing I was looking at is integrating a library to decimate a whole lot of faces from the scene. It's a pre-optimisation phase prior to rendering, so that triangles covering a very wide area that does not change slope much can be simplified. This results in an incredible performance boost if done right and I've found the software to do it. Once everything works together, I'll put up another screenshot. It'll probably be a scene in which the information is retrieved from the Internet, which is then filtered through the optimiser and then put inside the renderer. |
| 2003-01-22 | Today I have selected the development environment for the GUI that I will need for the editors. The landscape renderer is going to use vast worlds. I have searched ages on the Internet but there is no such easy polygon editor for landscapes. I have selected the Qt-3 toolkit to support the base components. Coin3D and the SoQt extension will be used to manage the scenery and objects. |
| 2002-12-09 | Project Start. |