I've successfully added impostors to the scene graph. This lets you render a group of entities to a texture when they are far away and draw a textured quad instead of the full geometry to speed up rendering of scenes with large numbers of objects such as trees. There are a few minor things to add like when to update the impostor, and generating the impostors at the end of a frame instead of the middle as needed. Eventually I'll add a tool to create forests and automatically set up groups of close trees with impostors.
I've also added the following to the editor:
- x y z scale buttons
- shows name and axis of current entity
- Ability to set initial angular and linear velocity to rigid bodies
- Global scene settings node for things like movement scale, snap settings
- Collision with triangle meshes and convex hulls, saving cooked data to disk for fast load times
Here are my major goals remaining:
- Save and load subtree with the ability to treat subtree like a single entity
- Finish joint nodes
- Cloth physics using hardware
- Make array of objects
- Copy and paste nodes
- User defined variables within nodes
- Sky cube node
- Lens flare node
- New asset manager that keeps track of dates so it can automatically load updated files at runtime
- A game test mode that lets you walk around the world with full simulation and scripts running
- Particle Systems
- Edit multiple scenes at once
- New Character animation routines
- FBX converter
- Large scale terrain manager with paging
- Terrain LOD
- Networking
