Very tired here. I’ve been going to sleep at 3AM again. Getting late (this morning 9 minutes !) to work. Sad.. tonight I must really focus and go to sleep at 2.
Yesterday was a rather stressful day. I had an animated phone conversation for the lamest of the reasons: ….ahh whatever !
Recently, I’ve upgraded my PC’s RAM to 1GB. Things seem much better now, but I need to test with video editing.. something that I gave up on doing when I had only 512.
Today I managed to close the long parenthesis that I opened while developing that 3D church thing. The M4D module is more or less working. The new file format is up. I’ve also simplified the triangle strips organization. Before, M3D had a list of strips to be optimized at load time for either PC based rendering or PS2 based rendering. On PC it’s convenient to make a big contiguous strip with degenerated triangles, on PS2 one can use the vertex-kick flag to restart strips.
I don’t have the PS2 kit anymore and both Xbox 360 and PS3 basically have PC’s graphics.. so, I’m just going for the contiguous strip in M4D, making the job easier for the renderer, which can use the data as is without re-processing.
Back to the church, next, I have to implement a mouse navigation system (mouse + keyboard, like Quake). This is needed because my sister will have to try it on her laptop and she doesn’t have the PS/PS2’s dual-stick interface.
After this, I’m really not sure what I will do. I want to put shadows in it. Shadows are the biggest issue. The church has no top, so I’m going to simulate sunlight, which implies hard edged shadows. That means that I either have to maniacally recursively tesselate the model, or I have to do a first shadow casting pass in world space. Have a shadow volume cut sharp the model, making sure to minimize the cuts. In the attempt to get this done, I’ll be dealing with M4D. All the polygon cutting and shuffling will push me to review the geometry database design or, in the best case, to add several functions to simplify this sort of operations.
Basically, it’s a lot more like writing a 3D engine for a 3D modeler rather than for a game.
On a completely different issue: the backup router that I’m using is a pain. It’s all in Japanese and I’m not sure if I have to find an option to make it work properly or if I have to disable its firewall altogether and use a software one for the time being.
My problem is that to make FTP work it’s not enough to have just the port 21 open. The router still has to be somewhat "intelligent" and sniff the traffic to open some extra random ports that are required for file transfers.
Now.. perhaps this old router has such feature.. but finding it in Japanese is going to be quite a challenge !
Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized