The Tsunami Engine

Well, I put my Labor Day weekend to good use. I gave up on trying to shoehorn Ogre into doing what I wanted (which was really impossible to begin with, since it would have never done portables) and have started just floating my own engine. I toyed with the idea of extending some of my existing rendering code, but even though I’m not going to use the engine directly, I learned a LOT from my time poking at OGRE and picked up some great ideas for library structure and design. So, I decided to start over, and, four days in, I’m making some good time.

That is an image of my previously demoed bug model rendered in the new engine. There isn’t any outlining in place yet (should be done fairly soon), but as you can see geometry and texturing are largely in place. He’s also spinning, but you can’t see that here for obvious reasons.

Also, this is using my own file format, which is something I should have done a long time ago. I was shopping around for a good model format to replace lib3ds, as it’s animation support is just horrid, when somebody at gamedev suggested I try writing my own export plugin for Blender. I love Python, I wrote the entire exporter (geometry and pose skeleton w/vertex weight info) in one evening.

Up next are:

• Outlines. NPR for the win!
• Skin deformer and keyframe animation. The reason I was looking Ogre in the first place, but I’m actually looking forward to writing this now that I’ve got my sleeves rolled up. Having my own export scripts and a custom-tuned format simplify the task to an incredible amount.
• Proper Entity instancing with scripting hooks.