Well, I finally complete my masters today! I'm looking forward to getting back into the community and having time to work on projects again!

So one of the things that's made developing anything for X3D difficult is the lack of tools. So, I've been working on a new level editor called XBuilder! It will provide GUI tools for easily making levels. It'll also handle a number of tasks (such as building light maps) that are currently done by the engine itself. This will greatly reduce the complexity of X3D's source code. Originally, it was just going to be an X3D application, but now I'm integrating in ImGui so it'll have a real GUI. Here are a few screenshots of what I have so far. Anything in red is geometry that already exists, blue means it's selected, and gray means it's a preview of what the resulting geometry would be. Also notice that it supports input in different distance units:

XBuilder

The source is of course on github. I'm going to be adding several more tools in the coming weeks. I'm going to need alpha testers so please let me know if you're interested! For the time being, I'm going to work on the texture tool so you can put a texture on a face

X3D has been in development for over a year now. At times, progress has been very fast, and other times, it's gone painfully slow. I've learned many hard lessons on how to become a good developer over the course of writing it. However, I have tended to rush things and, overall, have made a terrible mess of the project. While I am not totally starting over, I am creating a development plan on how to move forward because, right now, the code is too terrible to continue. It's time to do things right so that the project actually makes some progress.

The new version of X3D will following the following development strategy:

   
• Development will be broken into phases, or iterations. That way, we have a goal that we're moving towards.
• At the end of each phase will be a small, working game that the community can play around with.
• Feedback will be welcome at anytime and bugs will no longer hang around for months It would be awesome if some programmers would be willing to mess around with the library and create some things so I can get feedback!
• A phase must be stable before moving onto the next one.
• No hacky solutions will be implemented to rush things, as this just creates technical debt that must be dealt with later. Also, code must be kept clean at all times!
• The entire development process will be transparent so people know what's being developed. Also, people can join the project anytime if they want to contribute.

If you're curious as to what the current development plan looks like, take a look here.
At anytime, to see what's currently in development, please see the Trello board here.

Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions!

Hi guys, I'm trying to get TiLP to work on Windows 7 64-bit, but I keep getting a popup that says "The procedure entry point g_assertion_message_expr could not be located in the dynamic link library libglib-2.0-0.dll. I've tried uninstalling/reinstalling, installing different version of TiLP, removing all other versions of GTK+, and installing Glade (as suggested in a post that it may be a path issue and Glade would resolve it). Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? Thanks!

Earlier this year I posted on Omnimaga about X3D, my 3D engine for the 68k calcs. After a month hiatus for health reasons, I resumed work on it in May Some of you may recall the dazzling light bridge from earlier this year:



Currently, I am in the process of rewriting the engine to support more complex geometry. It's been a long and slow process (I'm currently interning full time as a software engineer), but I've started to make some progress. The last version had levels which were constructed of interconnected cubes. The player could walk around inside the resulting structure, which proved to be very efficient. However, my whole goal of starting X3D was to get Descent to run on the 68k calcs, and many rooms in Descent are constructed of 20 or more cubes, which is just too much to handle. So, this new version will allow levels to be constructed of prisms instead of just cubes. What do I mean by prisms? Here's an example of an octagonal prism:



The idea is you have two bases, each with the same number of points. However, the bases can be stretched, skewed, and rotated, so long as the resultant 3D shape is convex. My ultimate goal for Descent 68k is to merge the cubes in complex rooms into large convex prisms. This is several times more efficient to render than the same room partitioned into cubes.

So far, I have created a new clipping algorithm that clips prisms against a 2D polygon. A fast algorithm for this is crucial for a portal renderer like X3D. So far so good!



Anyway, this time around, it's going to have a lot of cool features. I'm hoping to get some people involved on the project or at least make some games with it once complete (it will be a TIGCC/GCC4TI C library). Let me know if you're interested!