Tuesday, January 31, 2006


Well, I think it's about time to write my first post on this blog!

There is much going on right now. My girldfriend is in India and doing her practice for her social work education. You can find her travel blog here (in swedish). I'm still in Lund and taking three courses at the university and I have started working on my C# 3D-engine 'Nebula' again.

The engine is written with 3D API independence in mind. Why, you might wonder. Most people tend to use Managed DirectX in the .NET world and that is ofcourse the most sane thing to do if you want to ever finnish your project :) However, I see this as a learning process and I don't want to constantly be temptated to take the easy road and use the goodies of D3DX utillity classes. By making it API independent I force myself to write everything myself! This ofcourse is not a philosophy I usually follow, but for learning stuff I think it's essential to do it all by yourself!

Up to this point, I have written a lot of boring plumming code like window management, scene graph management, resorce managment, vector and matrix math etc. The screenshot here is probably the first produced by this engine that is even a little bit intresting =). It features a heightmapped terrain with 1025 x 1025 vertices and simple Blinn-phong lightning. The terrain is divided in chunks of 65 x 65 vertices that are part of the scene grapth and culled against the view frustrum. I'm currently working on a GeoMipMapping implementation (LOD).

Well, thats about it for this time!