Next Steps for Hieroglyph

Next Steps for Hieroglyph

Since wrapping up the skinning code, I've been cleaning up and commenting a few areas that were lacking due to all of the debugging code I was putting in to figure out the problems. I have also been fixing compilation warnings, as well as handling a few TODO: notes that were scattered throughout the project. As I finish these up, I'll be pushing code base back onto the SVN repository on codeplex.

With that all behind me, I'm beginning to make plans for the next step in the engine. From the beginning of the project, I wanted to have scripting be available and functional as a prototyping tool. Up until now, I only have the skeleton of my Lua script manager ported over to Hieroglyph 3. This will be the next step in the evolution of the engine - adding scripting support to make it easier to build scenes, customize various data/options, and even to build prototype rendering effects.

The last point in particular gets me excited. My normal work flow when working on rendering algorithms is to have a new render view class in C++, which essentially takes a scene as input, then create the needed resources (i.e. buffers, textures, or effects) and use the scene and resources together to render something. There are quite a few details that aren't trivial to work out in building something like this, so iteration speed is important. Lua will help me to be able to implement a render view in scripts instead of native code. In this way, I should be able to not only work faster, but it will also make it much more approachable for someone else to sit down and use the engine for a quick trial of an algorithm. This is certainly an important part of the engine, so stay tuned for how this works out.

I'm also preparing to build in some functionality to visualize resources that are being used in the engine. For example, if you are using 3 offscreen buffers and want to see what is happening in each of them, normally you would have to fire up PIX or PerfHUD to see them. I want to formalize a visualization framework to provide fast and easy access to the data in your resources. This should also be a nice addition to the engine, and I look forward to seeing how it works out.