Just another month gone by

And another month goes by. I've been using Torque for almost two years now, and I still feel like a noob.

In my last .plan I mentioned a fair number of resources I intended to release when 1.4.2/1.5 came out. I'll get to those, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. I've been too busy moving all of my other code up to 1.5 to work out those resources and such.

On a related note, I am extremely happy that I decided to encapsulate all of my shader code in its own files outside of Torque proper. That made the upgrade much smoother. It also made it easy to put shaders into TGB, not that I'm planning to do anything interesting with that.

It's doing... something. Don't ask me what. It requires a Radeon 9500 to do it though!

Also in my last .plan I discussed creating a Torque based shader IDE. It's come a fair way since then. It actually works now.

Oops, made a typo

It also works with Cg as well.

I said it works. I didn't say it looked pretty.

While I still don't intend to develop this into a serious IDE, I am reevaluating my previous idea of just stopping at being able to write some simple shaders. On one hand, there are plenty of nice shader IDE's out there that are amazingly good at what they do. On the other hand, there isn't a single shader IDE that is crossplatform or supports GLSL and Cg, or supports the OpenGL assembly shaders. Therefore, while I still don't want to create an application that does everything FX Composer or RenderMonkey does, I am considering putting in some more advanced features to help even the playing field a bit, so to speak.

Anyhow, enough serious talk, let's see some shiny pictures!







More here.

All said and told, it wasn't my most active month ever. In large part, that's been because of the 1.5 release, which forced me to go back and look at all of my old code. A pretty decent chunk of it is getting an overhaul to help streamline it, document it, and improve overall readability. In other words, it finally occurred to me to actually document that shader subsystem I wrote.

Oh, and the Cg runtime environment drives me insane. Just wanted to throw that out there. See you all next month!