I can’t believe this…
I can’t believe this…
I spent all afternoon hacking and slashing through the
DirectX docs trying to find the right combination of flags to get a colored
ship on the screen. Not only that, but every iteration meant a recompile and
link.
Time consuming? Yes
Hassle? Yes
Avoidable? YES!!!
I was playing around with the DX9 SDK and found the ever sooo
cool EffectEdit program. This program essentially allows me to prototype vertex
and pixel shaders on the fly without the edit/compile/link cycle.
In a couple of hours (which includes n00b time), I’ve gotten
our ship on the screen with a nicer glow than I had this afternoon. The
interface is easy and the interpreter is wonderful. It appears to be a rich
edit interpreter because I can use cut and paste code with different fonts and
it works perfectly.
Anyways, if the efficiency of this tool isn’t enough to get
us to switch to DX9, I don’t know what is.
[Actually, I could probably port the shader to dx8]
Another breakthrough…
Remember how I mentioned that I think the alpha screwed me
up last time? Well, it turns out that, if done properly, the alpha in the
texture is a real boon. No more glow map, add it to the alpha channel. Of
course, this doesn’t solve the problem of the glow emitting off the model, but
it’s a start.
Anyways, with a little finagling and the TextureTool, I was
able to get the glow map into the texture as the alpha channel. Really Cool!!
Alex is going to love this.
Thanks again to Scott for getting me the kick ass glow map.
