Rendering static meshes

I’ve had this working for quite a while, now. The model loader is hard-coded to handle a single mesh and hasn’t changed since it was touched in almost a year (October 13, 2019). The mesh stripification was also hard-coded in the editor (processing one model at a time). It’s a basic format consisting of a specific vertex specification, no support (yet) for skeletons, textures, or lighting. The different colours indicate which strip the triangles belong to.

Maya is the tool of choice (3.0, to be specific), which has an issue regarding textures. I may be too used to newer versions of Maya, however, I couldn’t find any way to save out a UV set as a bitmap. I have a texture already created that wraps around a cube well enough, but not any arbitrary mesh. A plugin will need to be written to enable working with UV sets. I’m also still working on the editor’s interface, which is pretty rough and will need a lot of work. I say editor, but it’s really nothing other than a program that doesn’t render anything and has been unfortunately cobbled together rather than designed. It’s bad and I need to take the time to design a plugin interface for it so that it can be used without requiring Maya or the Katana SDK to be installed.

Next on the list of things to do is to get textures working. I plan on supporting bump mapping (which isn’t built into the PVR chip on Dreamcasts), though it may be incredibly expensive. After textures comes lighting, then skeletal animation. Morph targets may be something I’ll look into, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the time investment.

The networking demo is still ongoing, at the moment I need to switch tasks because I’m spinning my wheels right now when it comes to network code. I’m sure that the problem will work itself out in the background, as usual.

Cube

Sphere