Adam's blog formerly game development, now just casual madness
RSS Feed
  • Exams, ContentProvider, RenderTargets

    Roughly 18 days to go. In the end of January / by the beginning of February, I’ll have to write my exams for this semesters courses. As probably most students, I tend to start learning mostly after passing a specific point. It is located somewhere between “Hey look, a lot of topics to deal with” and “Oh my god, where’s all the time gone?!”. Usually after passing this point, my free time just waves me goodbye and vanishes. This happened a week ago and I’m pretty sure this will be the last post until mid or end of February. Wish me luck!

    Read More »

  • Picking Colors

    Have you ever used the .Net Color Picker Dialog? I did for a while but wasn’t quite content with it. For the Duality Editor, I don’t need any dialog-internal predefined colors and the additional clicks to define and choose a custom color reduce its usability. Also, there is no way to select a color with alpha channel support. After evaluating some other .Net ColorPicker modules out there, I decided to write my own. You can see the result on the right. If you need something similar, feel free to download its source code (Visual Studio Solution) and use it in your own project.

    Read More »

  • Editor Stuff

    Nothing much to write about right now, I’m working here and there, but mostly on editor and GUI stuff. I was just about to take some AlphaBlend / AlphaTest / AlphaToCoverage comparison screenshots when I realized that Alpha Testing actually looked better than AlphaToCoverage and not at all “aliazed”. Well, it turns out my video card supports proper alpha tested multisampling. While speculating how to detect whether or not the video card supports this (i.e. whether or not to use AlphaToCoverage), here is the comparison / editor screenshot anyway.

    However, despite the fact that my video card has really nice multisampled alpha testing: You can still see that AlphaToCoverage and AlphaBlending look pretty much the same if the MSAA level is high enough (Here: 16x). Considering that AlphaToCoverage doesn’t need Z sorting, this is great news for the rendering optimizer.

  • Materialism

    I’m spending Christmas at home with my family. However, despite all the holiday bustle there’s still some time without anything to do, so I found some time to continue working on Duality. Rendering and content stuff; specifically: A simple Material system.

    Read More »

  • It's alive!

    Finally some visible, screenshot-compatible progress. The plugin architecture (discussed here) is now implemented and the editors basic framework slowly comes to life. I’ve done a lot of concept work and polished some of the existing code design. According to my current plans, the final version will come with the engines editor and a ready-to-go launcher application in which the game will run. Also, the project’s got a name now: Duality.

    Read More »