Real Time Graphics Asg07

This assignment wasn't too shabby.  Once again the hardest parts seemed to be the sorting and setting up the  PIX calls properly.  I probably went about this the completely wrong way, but its been one of those weeks, or months or semesters or whatever.  Anyway, for the assignment we had to set up PIX event calls to make debugging in PIX easier.  Which is pretty awesome, but I haven't really had a reason to use it in awhile.  I suppose that's good, I'm sure I'll learn all the details when something goes horribly wrong as with most debugging tools.  Check these awesome buckets though.

The transparency stuff wasn't too bad.  Sorting the draw order so you could see all three cubes inside of each other was kind of a hassle, but not terrible difficult.  I now have somewhat gross sorting loops in more than enough places, but hey, selection sort on 9 items is probably manageable.

I think the thing that caused me the most trouble was actually a sorting loop that got copied and pasted from another incorrectly.  It was actually causing my transparency to not work at all, I think because certain settings were turned off at certain times.  Once I caught the error, a counting issue, everything just worked.  

Also, I had an issue with the world being incredibly dark, but I think that problem stemmed from some bigger issues.  I'm not sure my specular lighting was functioning exactly as it should.  Speaking of which, I moved the specular exponent to the materials finally, so be happy about that.  :)  I just realized I did not take the number out of my scene file though, so it is still being read in and parsed and not used.  I'll fix that later, everything is already zipped up and uploaded now though.  Anyway, back on track, my specular lighting wasn't quite working properly I thought, and upon looking into it I noticed I was actually passing a zero into the shader instead of my scene files value, I probably switched it out a bit ago as a test and forgot about it.  Upon fixing that, and a few other things, that I messed up this week, the scene went really dark.  Part of that was because of my ambient lighting being really small do to compensate for some of the other errors I had.

Long story short, there were several small lighting problems that when fixed turned into other problems.  I think I got it all sorted now.

Here's the code.  Sorry this writeup was so rambly and all over the place.  Hope you got the gist of it, nothing in particular actually pertaining to the assignment was terribly difficult this week.  Just a lot of little things that needed to be fixed.