In the last time the project got a bit slowed down due to various stuff the team members had to attend to in their real life. Nevertheless a lot has been done under the hood and some work on the surface. With surface I refer to progress that can be showed in terms of screenshots as most of the work is still engine oriented which does not provide screenshots well.
Edwinbradford took some time to produce some examples of office wall papers to check out his abilities. They have turned out very well so far and one of them is now provided as screenshot for you. He will also start texturing models somewhere in the near future to fill the gaps still widely open in that department. New models there are not yet as we spend more time on testing out animations and poses on the existing models. One of the test-runs is also provided in screenshot form.
Furthermore a first reshape of the HUD has been done to move into the direction of the intended HUD. It is still yet not finished but contains mostly all the elements except the information panels about characters and troups. In general the HUD consists of the Use-Modes ( upper left ), State Icons ( upper right ), the Quick-Use Panel ( bottom ) and the Augmentation System ( right ). Besides others the game features three different Augmentation Systems the player can all take advantage of.
Another mile stone has been done in the coding departement: the first running windows version! The current build of the engine runs now on both, Linux and Windows. Furthermore many tweaks concerning Huge-World rendering and Collision Detection/Response have been done to allow implementing the first ODE powered physics somewhere in the near future. Still a lot of work has to be done in the renderer but we will get there. So stay tuned for more.
![Drag[en]gine](https://media.moddb.com/cache/images/engines/1/1/9/crop_120x90/banner_large.png)
Ah right, so anything more that is needed can be written in as a module? Are modules written in C++, and are you supporting HLSL shaders (this probably seems nooby - I'm no coder, so I'm just asusming shaders can be written in other languages here)?
the gamer choses the modules to power his games. the game developer usually does not have to worry about what module the gamer uses in the end. the modules itself are written in C++. the current opengl graphic module supports GLSL and ALS. HLSL will not be supported as it's not good. but if somebody wants HLSL support he can simply write a graphic module to take advantage off.
as game developer you do NOT worry about shaders and stuff like that. you simply tell the graphic module to pull of this and that graphic trick and the it does drive the graphic card with the correct set of shaders. so you do not touch shaders at all if you make a game. you work with an abstraction layer hiding all those nasty technical problems from you but still giving you enough power.
Great stuff as usual :)
Very cool!
cool cool, well done, cant wait :)
I'm glad you're catering for us Windows-noobs now Dragonlord XD
Looking sexy, can't wait
Good decision with Windows. Looking sexy, Lord Dragon. I've always loved the way you've translated special effects that normally are hud elements, scopes, computers, that sort of thing, in-game. Good going.
Actually I have a few questions. Will you be supporting/providing sexy shaders like relief mapping, parallax mapping or normal mapping? Also what animation support are you planning?
I'd love to mod this engine :D
what kind of 'special effects' in terms of shaders is not a concern for the engine but the Graphic Module you choose to power your game. the default OpenGL module provides conventional normal-mapping so far but anything else is possible if required.
concerning animations again it depends on the Animation Module and Rig Module you use. the default DEAnimation ( *.anim.xml ) and DERig ( *.rig.xml ) support exporting from Blender3D skeletal animations with unrestricted key-frames and vertex-keys ( later one not yet part of the engine but will come, required for facial animation ).
concerning in-game animations you have full access to bones data. you can use either some pre-made animation classes to simply apply animations from a file or mixing them. if this is not enough control you can go down and manipulate the position/rotation/scaling of each individual bone in your model on your own. this way you can drive the entire animation of your model without using an animation file if you want to. hence you have the most possible control over animations ( from quick and simple to get down and dirty ).
i hope this gives some insights. otherwise look at the engine documentation. important classes have more indepth descriptions.