You can control the camera with WASD and the cube with the arrow keys, it works just like the instructors and it spins constantly. Most of the code ended up in cRenderer, it's kinda gross in terms of organization at the moment, but until I really see what's going on and where we are going with this class I'm gonna leave it as is.
So this assignment was pretty dang hard. I understood all the concepts of the various view spaces discussed in class, and understood what we were supposed to implement, which I'll go over here to humor John Paul.
Basically we created a cube in model space, converted it to world space in the shader, converted that to view space and finally to projected space and sent that to the fragment shader. It made plenty of sense and I've had a lot of 3D math experience, but actually writing the code was a whole other ordeal. I relied very heavily on the video of the lecture since a lot of sample code could be gleaned from there. I had the most trouble figuring out how various components communicated with each other though.
For instance assembling the index buffer was easy, I drew a diagram, counted the vertices and set it all up using the already written vertex buffer code. It's almost identical, you just have to change a lot of method calls to the index equivalent. Making the two buffers play nice was another matter that actually ended up being a simple as changing the draw method, but it wasn't immediately obvious.
The hardest part was figuring out how to make the camera communicate with everything. Setting up a class was easy, but it ended up just sitting there until a classmate showed me how to integrate it with the world to view transform, which in retrospect makes total sense. View to projected on the other hand just takes weird unintuitive parameters.
Once everything was built, I still had a lot of debugging I had to do. When you copy and paste code, things don't always get changed as they should. The most frustrating part was seeing a perfect cube drawn in the PIX Mesh tab like so, but seeing nothing in my fun little window.
Turns out I set up my camera's translate function to equal an offset rather than plus equal an offset so it was perpetually trapped inside the cube where nothing was rendered. I had to set some culling mode that a classmate showed me so that I could at least see that things were being drawn before realizing the camera translate bug.
This was an awesome assignment though, learned a ton about the graphics pipeline and I can't wait to try out this lighting business. After all that's why they're called shaders, I assume. Here's the source code.
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