Where we are at

Getting back into the groove after the break.  One of the last things we did before we left was design a system for keeping reflection information for our data in memory, even at runtime, which gives us a large boost to flexibility… the difficult part about this being that the runtime portion of the system must adhere to stricter performance requirements.  It must be decently fast, and it can’t chew up a lot of memory.  Implementation based on that design is now underway.  Besides that we are also in the middle of getting the short term task list back in order after our vacation, re-working the “canvas strip” UI to more efficiently use the horizontal tool property space and Andy and I are also preparing for a quick trip to China.

What was completed this cycle

• The FBX SDK was updated to the latest version so we are keeping on track with that.
• Several miscellaneous bugs were fixed with the project view.
• The project view got some simple “status icons” added to the overlay, to hopefully help convey file status information at a glance.
• The basis for “Debug” rendering was added to the runtime side.  This allows us to draw things like the grid, locators, bounding boxes, all that good stuff, in the engine.
• Multiple render context support was added to the engine.  This allows it to runder to multiple different windows at the same time.  This will be important, for example, when you have a scene open and would like to open a single entity within that scene and make some edits to it.  Now we can just open another frame and draw there, rather than being forced into taking over your currently open scene.
• Some bugs were fixed in our automatic UI generation code concerning collapsing/expanding tree views.

What’s next

Next is the same as its been for a while.  We continue hammering away on the systems we need to get merged so the engine and tools can gracefully communicate with each other.  Additionally something we are going to look into soon is trying to work out the design of the UI for handing multiple scenes at once.  This ties in very closely with the project view, so it’s a logical next step for the UI.

2 cycles in 1 update?!

Yes, and no.  Cycle 15 was the weeks of Dec 21 – Jan 4, so we were actually in the office for a whopping 2 work days for Cycle 15.  The work from those days has been rolled into Cycle 16.

Demo time

Nothing to show this week.