I put in a good 6 hours today and got an ok amount accomplished. There was a good bit of refactoring and additions to the code base I worked on last time. But today’s focus was on user input.

I created the Mode Service Framework Service. In traditional event based frameworks this would be called the dispatcher. It takes input and generates and dispatches events to where they are supposed to go.

It is now to the point where I can receive keyboard input and perform an action specified by a class that inherits from the Mode base class. The big things that the Mode Service does is controls a stack of Modes. The idea is there are different situations that will require input to be handled differently.

So if say the program starts up with a GUI to select a file to load, mouse clicks will be dispatched to GUI components. Then once a 3D file is selected a new Mode will be pushed onto the stack. Now mouse input is used to rotate or move the 3D world.

The next step with this is designing the actual messages. I need to figure out exactly what is required for a versatile message struct which will be what is passed around inside the framework. Then my now working Mode Service can generate a message and dispatch it to an Element.

As you might imagine the design of the message / event struct is absolutely mission critical so I am taking some time to design it.

After that is all set up I will be moving onto the Resource Manger service and my Scene Graph!

- Adam