Development progress

The week since the last release has been pretty productive, and I have been able to complete several enhancements:
  • Very substantial and significant code clean-up and revision of the CaWE internals, especially related to the 3D renderer and world representation.
  • The CaWE 3D views now show the smooth-group membership of faces color-encoded (in view type "SmoothGroups"): Same color means same smooth-group, and colors are "added" if a face is in multiple groups.
  • CaWE now uses explicit MatSys materials for all of its non-textured rendering, i.e. the flat-shaded and wireframe view types.
  • Added the "noShadows" keyword to the MatSys materials. In the cmat scripts, you can now selectively turn off shadows for materials that do not qualify as shadow-casters. This eliminates many of the strange places in the demo where e.g. a bush casts a rectangular shadow.
  • Added the "polygonMode" and "depthOffset" keywords to the MatSys materials. These are very important for decal support and e.g. the proper wire-frame outlining of selected objects in CaWE.
  • Completed full support for cube-maps for all renderers of the MatSys! All that remains to be done is writing a few great shaders for them, which I'll start immediately next!
All these improvements will be included in the maintenance release that I have scheduled for early August. (August 2005, that is. :) )


The image shows a set of selected brushes in the 3D view, now properly highlighted and outlined.