Engineering

What I've been working on lately is a 2D-engine type of thing. It's made with managed DirectX.

A fake-2D that is... It uses Direct3D to create vertices in 3D-space and renders textured quads that look like 2D.

Screeny

If some smartypants thinks he can identify the game where I stole the tile graphics from, go ahead and try to guess. ;)

The engine currently can render a tile map like in the screenshot... the rendering process can probably be optimized by using some trickery and made faster. The actual tile map data is loaded from a XML file like this and the texture data is saved in a resource file, which uses some MS defined resource file format... I made a small utility to create resource files and add/remove/extract resources to/from them and a DLL which contains the code for getting System.IO.Streams of the files inside.

So now I'm trying to get "picking" to work. What's this picking? It basically means that I want to get the engine to detect what objects are under the mouse cursor in 3D-space... which is giving me a damn headache. I've tried projecting the mouse coordinates into 3D space to create vectors and rays and whatever and calculating intersections... and tried projecting the quads into 2d space, which was more successful but the quad positions are a bit offset, so it's not working well enough either. HELPPpp...


On other news, Super GT 2006 was released today (actually yesterday as I'm posting this on 4th). The linked page contains samples... so go go go.


And on the other other news, which are actually rather old, the fansubbing group Bakafish has been subbing Hard Gay episodes. For those of you who don't know who this Hard Gay persona is, go ahead and take a look at this wikipedia article... or actually, I'll just say it here: He's hilarious. 'nuff said about that.

Visit Bakakage forums for the episodes. You may have to register to get access to the Hard Gay forum.



My random thought of the moment: why do most people think I'm weird, because I don't feel any need to "hunt" women? Actually even I find it weird at times, since everyone says so... Come on, sex is not the only thing a woman can offer.


That's it for now.