Image loading and XML

Today was much more productive than yesterday. After getting back from shopping (needed some food desperately), I started work on the engine. Previously, my engine only supported TGA format for textures, which was fine before, but as this is more generic, it needed more format support. Therefore, looked around a bit and decided to use DevIL. It’s open source and under the Lesser GPL (a necessity since the engine might be used commercially). Plus, it supports a host of different formats: JPG, TGA, TIFF, etc etc…all packaged into a nice library. So, got that implemented into my engine and it’s working beautifully. The loading code is now very small thanks to the library. I did, however, run into a bit of a hitch when implementing it. For some reason, all textures on the models I tested were completely messed up. Turns out I had to call:

iluFlipImage();

When loading images with the library it loads the images flipped, so you have to unflip it. That was really the only problem I had with it, so that’s not too bad.

Now that techniques, passes and all that have been implemented, I now need a way of storing that data to disk. Originally, I had thought of using a simple script to represent a material (like Quake 3 and OGRE), but considering it some more, XML seems to be the better approach. Scripts are easier to read, but I intend on creating a UI for creating materials so that’s not a problem. As for speed, parsing an XML file is extremely fast, and TinyXml is an excellent library for the job. Used the library with Agents, and it worked like a charm. So there…that’s what I’m going to do.

So that’s pretty much where I stand now. Next on the agenda is to integrate my shader handling classes into the mix, so that I can get some per-pixel lighting, parallax mapping, and all that fun stuff implemented.

Alright, that about does it…another update will be coming tomorrow.