Projects and products
Projects and products
In parallel with GUI Editor, I developed the audio part of my framework. I wrote an abstraction layer to handle the AudioContext and I created an implementation of it with OpenAL Soft libraries (but it can be implemented with any other audio library). I created also an abstraction layer to handle audio tracks and sounds. […]
I'm closing the month of April with 300 commits, everything in just 1 month. I wrote most of the code for the Gui Editor application and all the missing audio part, with support for dolby surround and 3D environment. Post link
All my latest efforts are focused in the development of the Gui Editor within TextureMind framework. With an average of 300 commits per month, I didn't have time to upload a new video, but the application is now almost complete. Now it's possible to manage skins, gui pages and resources. With the gui page editor, […]
It's done! Taking advantage of the extra time I have now, I finished the GUI associated with my TextureMind framework. Compared to the previous update, I added Frame Windows, Tree Views, Tab Strips, Tool Bars and Docking Layouts. I fixed lot of bugs, improved the management of resources and events, optimized the algorithms to draw […]
I recently focused my efforts on the development of some widgets for displaying lists of items, in particular: listviews, menus and combo boxes. Listviews are optimized to handle hundreds of thousands of items without causing the application to slow down too much. Listviews can be configured to draw colors corresponding to different events, such as […]
I'm glad to release the first demo of PC Breathless that you can try on your own PC desktop or laptop. The minimum requirements are Windows, GPU card and Vulkan libraries installed. You can turn around your view with the mouse and set forward with the up/down cursors, eventually go up and down with the […]
A new AnsiC parser was born inside TextureMind Framework. I'm programming this parser from scratch, starting to implement all the standard ISO C89 features. Most importantly, the parser is designed for being extended to any other language, formal and not formal, which is the main reason why I didn't use another existing and well proven […]
I've continued with the implementation of the framework's proprietary GUI. In this case, I implemented a new widget to handle textboxes. As you can see in the video, this is not just a text box widget to put some text into it, but a complete text editor that can be used for any purposes, from […]
After years without updates I'm glad to present probably the most important update so far. In the past, the framework was just a monolith of C++ static libraries that could be enterely or partially included within a project to access various functionalities. On one hand it was good, because it simplified the programming of the […]
I created a video to show the potential of the Vulkan renderer included in my framework. Now the engine can import 3D models from several 3D formats (including collada) and render them with Vulkan libraries. The engine is equipped with a proprietary material system and mesh format. The materials of the imported models are converted […]
Now the engine in Vulkan can draw text with bitmap rendering. The engine checks which characters are on the screen and it creates dynamically the textures only for the fonts to be drawn, with the correct size and aspect. The characters are precalculated into bitmap with the FreeType library and loaded into Vulkan textures only […]
Skinned mesh rendering is a fundamental part of every modern 3D engine, so I couldn't avoid to implement it. The skinned mesh with weights, indices, bones, skeleton, and animated nodes is imported with AssImp library into my format. I added weights and indices to the vertex attributes while bones matrices are written into a shader […]
I improved the material system, introducing the lighting stage. I removed the fragment stage and replaced it with color and lighting stage. The output color is calculated as the sum of the color stage and the lighting stage. The color stage has only one material node as input that is used to produce the output […]
Now the importer with AssImp library is capable to import model materials and textures into my format. I added also support for normal maps with tangent and bitangent vertex attributes, improving the lighting stage in the fragment shader to render it properly. In the video you can see nano suit model imported from collada format. […]
I decided to use AssImp library to import models from other formats to my 3D mesh format. The video shows a first implementation of the importer. Vertices and normals are converted along the skeleton structure, while the red material is generated just to render the model on the screen. The next step is to load […]
Finally, the very first 3D model rendered by the 3D engine. Even if it looks like a simple torus demo, the main feature this time is the format used for the 3D mesh and the convertion from material nodes to vulkan shader, for the rendering. The mesh is composed by a polygon hull, a set […]
I improved the implementation of materials and textures with Vulkan. Now every material is translated into a GLSL shader that is converted into SPIRV code with shaderc library. The shader is generated along the graphics pipeline to match the material settings. For now materials are very simple and used to draw an image texture with […]
I am happy to announce that Vulkan library has finally been integrated into my framework. For the moment nothing complicated, I limited myself to implement a specialization of the Graphics Context that draws simple colored rectangles instead of the images drawn by Cairo library. It's possible to invoke drawing commands with the same degree of […]
Finally I came to a first working version of the 2D GUI based on the Cairo libraries. The entire GUI architecture is based on 2D Engine components like the graphics and the physics engines. The graphics engine makes use of graphics context that in this implementation is based on Cairo, but it can be specialized […]
Having a graphics context to draw something on the screen is not enough when you have to deal with complex scenes made of many textures, materials, shapes and assets of any kind. This is the reason why at some point of my framework development I introduced the concepts of Scene, Engine and Resources. Basically, a […]
In my framework, I implemented materials for being extremely scalable. First of all, I decided to abandon the old format similar to 3D Studio Max or Maxon Cinema 4D and adopt another format more similar to UE4 that is based on Visual Expression Nodes, where one node in this case is called "material component". A […]
I implemented a set of classed to handle system windows and events. Now it's possible to open a window and draw an image inside. I also programmed an abstract class for graphics context to handle graphics functionality in common with the most important graphics libraries, like DirectX, OpenGL and Vulkan, even if the first specialization […]
One of the most important component in a framework is a cross-platform loader of dynamic libraries. Without it, you cannot access to the functionality of external dynamic libraries like OpenGL, DirectX or Vulkan, or at least you may have to add extra code for every library on every platform you have to support. In some […]
Even this framework has been designed for generic purposes, it will be used to program basically graphics applications. In this perspective, I implemented a full set of serializable classes to handle complex numbers, vectors and matrices and all the geometric operations that will be used to realize a 3D engine. To serialize some enum variables […]
I continued to program the TextureMind Framework and I'm pretty happy with the result. I wish that this framework will give me the chance to increment the production of my software and to save most of the time (because I don't have it). People told me many times to use already existing frameworks to produce […]
I tried to implement the explicit multisample antialiasing and I got good results, but it's slow on a GeForce 9600GT. A scene of 110 fps became 45 fps with only four samples, just to point out the slow down. While I was jumping to the ceiling for the amazing image quality of a REAL antialiasing […]
TSREditor is a huge editor in the style of Blender3D projected to create or edit the resources like textures, 3d models, sound and levels for games and other stuff. In spite of the large amount of work needed to reach a decent version of this software, I decided that it will be free as a […]
This is the first "work in progress" video of my 3d engine called Unrelated Engine. Some complex animated models come from Doom 3. They were converted to a maximum of 4 weights per vertex as well as the identical vertices have been cancelled to improve the speed. The shader language was used to obtain a […]
I created a nice video with an engine that I'm still developing and that is part of my Unrelated Framework. It uses: - OpenGL (to draw the graphics) - DevIL (to import images) - Assimp (to import 3d models) The 3d models are from http://www.models-resource.com/, they were used only to test my engine and to […]
OpenIL is a library with very powerful image loading capabilities and I decided to include it in my framework. My standard can handle several image formats like the classic 8 bit RGB or more advanced formats like 16 bit RGB or High Dynamic Range. The images are imported from file and used maintaining the original […]
The Unrelated Framework got support for ziv-lempel compression of data using ZLib. The classes can be compressed in memory, loaded and saved with few rows of code and without limits. For example: //this works only with resources like images, fonts, sounds, etc... C_Image *newImage = new C_Image(); newImage->ImportFromFile("test.tga"); //load image from file newImage->SetFileFormat(UF_FileFormat_Zip(6)); //set a […]
Finally I completed the GUI of my framework. The best feature is that the Gui can work in two modes: via software or using the OpenGL. It's very helpful for cross platform compatibility, for video games or other OpenGL purpose. The Gui is in his first version but it has all the widgets necessary to […]