Aaaahhhhh…. BSP traversal solved. Great lesson on MACROs learned. Text alpha blending problem diagnosed and possible solutions in the works. Entity parsing and creation from BSP files implemented. Things are going well.

I can start the technical planning of the tech demo stuff I mentioned in the last .plan now while I figure out how to handle the alpha blending issue.

But I’ve had a long time to look back on different design decisions as well as look forward to future design decisions and I have distilled two imperatives that must be addressed.

The first, and I knew this one was coming and intentionally left it till now, is how I was doing to make the engine code independent from the game code so the engine code would need no knowledge of the game code at compile time. Since this is cross platform DLLs are out of the question. So I choose to split the code into two projects. The ‘Core’ project, which will be a static link library containing all of the Engine specific code, and the ‘External’ (probably will be renamed) project which will link to and use the Core project.

The second is a product of the lack of time I had while developing this and my desire to push towards something I could show. I’ve always felt my Scene Graph implementation was the weakest point of the project. And as I have worked with it I have identified areas for improvement. In fact, the alpha blending issue with the text is a problem with the scene graph. So I have been talking to a lot of people and analyzing previous decisions and thinking about how I could improve them and I am currently working on a new conceptual design for my Scene Graph implementation. It actually won’t require major code changes, but conceptually it will be pretty different.

The first of these issues I do hope to address before my dead line (which is in 3 weeks!) but the second will probably come after.

So what is next? I will probably hack in some sort of fix for the alpha blending problem in the scene graph for now since I am pressed for time and it will probably change anyway. And the next big thing is, as talked about before, a basic GUI class and re-loading of BSP files.

So before I go, here is a screen of my very simply level which I use for BSP leaf testing.
You can see the hideous Alpha Blending issue on the text, and the green block in the bottom left is a place holder for the Black Engine logo.



- Adam