Here is the first screenshot from the new 3D Engine. Still needs some extra work. There are a few object files which it cannot read and at the moment transparent textures are a lurid lime green where the transparent bits should be
http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b306/scruffyduck/tut01_030.jpg
….pretty much anyway. I can now display and manipulate FS9 objects in 3D using DirectX. Got a bit bemused when all the textures appeared to be upside down but that’s fixed now. It will be a while before there is anything really to test. The program is still very fragile.
Well I have gotten further than I expected. I have a basic rendering engine created using C# and DirectX. It can't render a Scenery Object yet but I have been able to access it as a dll from my Test Program. I still have some problems with it but I am hoping to develop (with a lot of help from books and guys on the NET) a 3D engine which will render multiple objects set in a scenery backdrop. I hope to use it first to display 3D objects in LOM and then later as the basis for a 3D designer for Scenery Maker
This may take a while! I do most of my development in VB.NET and really only use my 'knowledge' of C# to convert stuff that I need from that language to VB. Both operate on dotNET so the resulting code that you run on your computer is pretty much the same. However I am finding that I need to use C# for the DirectX work. I have been thinking for some time about moving, but given that LOM has over 26,000 lines of code I am not that excited about the prospect. Well of course anything written in C# and compiled in to a library can be used by LOM so from now on I plan to create library functions such as the Object Renderer in C#. So that is me back to the drawing board twice so to speak, once to learn about DirectX and once to bring my theoretical knowledge of C# up to a level where I can write complex applications in it…….. I may be some time.
Today I finished the code to de-compile an FS9 scenery object so that it can be rendered by DirectX. Thanks to the work done by Arno and MDL Tweaker II, I was able to confirm that I am extracting the correct information. So the next job is to convert the data about the object into information that DX understands……………….watch this space………
I have updated the web site a bit, changed the navigation bars and moved the content around. I am still not completely happy with the navigation but I think it is getting more to what I need
