its been awhile...

gee i cant believe that scince my last post a month already passed, time rly runs fast eh? (mhh maybe i shouldnt sleep so much lol) my 3d engine has been through alot of changes scince i went over to the C#-frontline. the kratom engine does now use wpf and is currently getting its editor,
the editor will help developers to manage content and theire scripts. another thing that might be interessting is that ive decided to add a "Spore"-like modelformat in addition to the static ".map"-models which could come in handy scince the engine will be heavily opitmized for small filesizes and websupport. btw, scince we are already talking about websupport and small filesizes, ive decided to leave out texturesupport scince this is totally outdated in my opinion. instead im going to make use of "Procedural ScreenSpace VectorTileMapping" (PSSVTM) which is basically a mixture of parallaxmapping tech and procedural textures. the differences however are:
1.) the parallaxeffect isnt restricted to be a 2.5D effect cuz instead of a simply heightmap it uses vectorgraphics , which allows stuff like "pixel over pixels" ...
2.) the effect is done in ScreeSpace which basically means that only visible pixels are going through the shader
3.) the shader is using/producing procedural content so instead of loading textures, the shader just generates the requiered informations based on the pixels position and some additional parameters defined by the artist.

Lua loads Lua

Alright folks , scince i already talked about some of Kratoms visual features, i think its time to talk about modifiability.Kratom is using Lua ,a powerful OpenSource scriptlanguage, but unlike other Engines Kratom only registers a function to load an Assembly made for the .NET-Framework, this allows users to use the full potential of the whole .NET-Framework within a simple Script,in short: Kratom is a compiler/interpreter for Lua# ^^. In addition to this the KratomEngine comes with a powerful IDE that makes coding much easier if somebody has a wishlist for the IDE-Features feal free to leave a message.

moving to c#

The last days i have played a bit with C# , and it rocks like hell. Unfortinatly this means that the first public release of my Kratom Engine will be delayed because i move the whole project over to C#. The good news is that the original C++ code is about 80% of all Functions needed and it'll only take a few days to rewrite everything.

Of course there are also some news about the Engine itself. I have implented full support for DooM3s ".md5mesh" and ".md5anim" files and kicked out the crappy ".md3"-loader, this also means less, and generally cleaner, code scince i already have a parser for ASCII texts (".map"-support). Another cool new feature i was thinking about is the GPU-Raytracer , which has great chances to work in realtime or at least speed up the loading times heavily. If my calculations are correct, the performance for per-pixel shadows should be on the same level as per-pixel lighting (without deferred shading) ,with projected textures from alpha surfaces coming for free. However this is just my calculation and i still gotta proove that im correct about this so dont get too excited now.