@Slin : great , you are reaaly skilled !
Conitec should hire you as programmer, i'm sure we would see lot of things in Forecast and Betas with you on the engine

Yesterday I implemented a basic particle system which happily works very well so far.
Not very good looking, but at least a screenshot:

I implemented tangents and wrote a basic tangent space spec bump normalmapping shader:


and I put together a basic solar system app, just for fun (the scaling is correct, the distances are not on this screenshot, as one would hardly see any planet then (it is already very hard to find the earth, the way it is on the screenshot)):

Oh, you're making good progress

Looks very interesting! How many hours are you already working on it?

I´ve got no idea.
I would guess something between 100 and 1000, probably closer to 1000 than to 100
There have been many days without me doing anything on it, but there are also some days at which I am working on it for 15h or something, so it is really hard to say

We just started a first big game project with it, which so far seems to be progressing very well and especially helps to fix bugs and adds new needed features and hopefully animations somewhen... (they would probably be already there if I hadn´t first to export them from within blender :P)

A year back or so I looked a bit deeper into DirectX 9. I bought a good tutorial and worked through it just for fun (not for a project or so). It was great fun, but when it came to bones animation the fun turned into a nightmare ^^ A lot of recursive functions and difficult matrix transformations...

I wish you a lot of fun with those

when i wrote the mdl7 blender exporter i couldn't get bone animations to work either. the matrix stuff almost drove me insane.

but then after a pause of some weeks i tried it from the other side. i wrote a simple opengl mdl7 viewer (in python) and after some trial and error i got the bone animations to work. then i knew how the matrices had to be contructed.

Oh boy, I wish you would write a binary model loader and exporter right now. I don't want to wait for forever just to check if everything works now.

Edit: Well, I want to show a screenshot too:

Okay, Nils almost punched me to death for last screenshot, so I promised him to post a better one.
Before you say "oh, the particle effect looks horrible", thats Nils fault!


Oh and btw, the screenshot is not staged but actual footage from a game.