So it has been a good week for me. I've been working on the rendering system for about 6 weeks. That's a lot of time to go with nothing to really show. Usually programmers should be able to finish a reasonably sized feature in a week or two at the most. I have been writing unit tests and those I got running successfully to get a little shot of success from time to time (more on those another time), but mostly I have been looking at a giant inert pile of code.

Until Tuesday.

On Tuesday I took the first screenshot ever of my little project. The first of many to come I assure you.



So wow, totally cool eh? Well no. To me sure. It shows that it is rendering triangles, it is loading the XML material definition assets and parsing them, that my exciting "red" pixel shader is loading and running, the scene graph is running, and given that the scene is a camera in the middle of a cube, the output is not totally unsurprising.

A couple more days of refinement gave me this variation.



You can't see the video, but that little cube spins and spins. I have my transformations (scaling, rotations, translations) running, I have a simple "lookat" camera which is no longer in the center of what it is looking at, I've fixed up the triangles so my cube doesn't have missing sections, and it is running multiple meshes and shaders, things are progressing!

The renderer is still far from complete. My next big task is to get libpng integrated and texturing working so my cube can be a little prettier. I also need to get a model loader running (the cube is defined in code.) I'm going to be using Collada for my model format, mainly because it is royalty-free and has pretty wide compatibility with 3D model editors.

The next success should be a little closer.