Today is my mother’s birthday !
For her birthday, she decided to take a vacation. ..All by herself, since my sister was busy with school. Right now she’s in Nice in France, but Sunday she was in Monaco to watch the F1 race by the starting line ! She went there and bargained for a last minute ticket to the race. Quite adventurous, for someone that speaks Italian and "shopping English". Comes to show how often just takes the will to do things.
A good lesson for me, since I’m one of those that drags his ass to do anything.
Anyhow, she said that seeing the race live was very exciting… just as I was told before !
I guess this year I really must go watch the Yokohama race !

Changing subject, today I completed the first version of m4d. The C+ (one plus) version of m3d. I also decided to dump new and delete. The reason is that it’s much easier to handle objects when they all have a common father. Also, it doesn’t make sense that OOP, which pushes hierarchy so much, ends up allocating all objects in the same domain !
A scene now contains an array of (scene’s) objects and each object contains an array of groups. That is, one pointer the actual array of data, not an array of pointers.
This way I have a direct relationship between a pointer and an index. The memory allocation is compact, no need to allocate hundreds of single objects, plus the array to track them.
I’ve also finished the converter from the 3DS format into m4d. Plus I’ve written a new flexible file format.
The new format is mostly "human readable". Because it doesn’t make much sense to scroll trough thousands of lines of floating point vertices, I decided that vertex data should be compacted by being printed out as 32 bit hexadecimal values and by putting several vertices on the same line.
The final look of the bulk data is a bit like MIME encoded binary data used for e-mail attachments.
This allows me to keep the format readable, easy to parse, but minimize the bulk.

Posted by Davide Pasca in Uncategorized