Real Time Graphics Asg04

So this assignment ended up being way harder than I thought.  Here it is.  This time we had to update our content pipeline so that we could generate all the relevant graphics data from text files.  Now with minor changes to some text I can add dozens upon dozens of cubes in of various colors and textures with colored light and intensity.  It's pretty much the greatest graphics content pipeline ever, objectively speaking.

Seriously though, the assignment had very little to do with actual graphics stuff, but ended up being kind of interesting regardless.  It was a lot of string parsing, which is the devil, and took forever, but that stuff is pretty boring and not too challenging so I don't really feel the need to talk about it.  It did take me like ten hours for that chunk alone though.

The reason it was interesting was the remaining 5 hours, you know, those 5 hours that you expect to take about 1, but it never really works out that way.  Once I got all the parsing stuff in, figuring out how to modify the current renderer class that our teacher built to display multiple sets of vertex data was quite the ordeal.  I ended up wrapping most of the LoadScene, ReleaseScene and Update methods in loops that basically did the same thing for each cube I had to draw.  The whole process didn't seem quite right, but by this point in the project I was somewhat out of steam.  I'll probably look into rearranging some things and optimizing in later assignments.  In fact, I think that's going to be an upcoming requirement of a new assignment.  :)

I also spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to pass data up from the parsers and into the eventual DirectX calls.  The other Jason and I had a pretty big debate about some aspects of it.  Mainly because he wanted to copy all the vertex and index data into the buffers we were already using and not change the DirectX calls.  I figured we'd save space and time by just passing the buffers we populated during the parsers directly.  After about 3 hours of trying to make it work my way, I gave up and did it his way.  I think I got really close, cause I found the biggest culprit of the errors I was getting was a typo in my mesh parsing code.  Still, at some point you just got to cut your losses.  I had other stuff to work on and I did meet all the requirements.

Anyway, despite this assignment not having much to do with the high level graphics stuff we always discuss in class, it forced me to be way more familiar with what all those DirectX calls were actually doing since now a lot of them are done three times.  Not all though, turns out clearing the screen 3 times per Update call is a bad idea.

Here's my PIX depth screenshot by the way.  I think this part of the assignment took about 7 minutes, but its definitely noticeable.

And here's my source code.