Unseen Studios

3 days and 1300+ lines of brand-new code later, I'm about 1/3 of the way to being able to load animated .X meshes. Now that the system's coming together, here's what it's going to sport:

• Fully capable of using any skeleton-animated (basically all) .X mesh
• Up to 4 blend weights per vertex
• Takes full advantage of hardware, including using vertex shaders for super fast rendering on high-end hardware
• Complete software support for older computers
• Unlimited number of animations
• fast, Fast, FAST! <-- I did a trial run of about 250 fully animated meshes before I noticed a drop from 60 FPS on my laptop

I should have this up-and-running by the end of the week. I look forward to being able to put some characters in this game

So awesome!

It has been a while since I posted, but I'm really getting excited now. I feel like a school girl again!

excellent! It's been ages since i've posted but i check here daily to see what's happening. Good work! I'm defiantly stoked.

Sounds sweet!

Karl G. wrote:fast, Fast, FAST! <-- I did a trial run of about 250 fully animated meshes before I noticed a drop from 60 FPS on my laptop

Well how much ram you got in it? My lappy only has 512mb.

I have 2 GB of RAM, but the meshes don't take up that much memory. The rendering speed is really limited by the graphics card and the number of GB/s throughput to the card. Here's a rough estimate of how much memory this takes:

250 meshes
~35 bones/mesh type
100 mesh types
1 matrix/bone in mesh type
1 matrix/bone in instance
~ 15 matrices/bone in mesh animation
let's say there are 135 mesh animation types

this gives:

(15 * 135) matrices for animation + (1 * 35 * 100) matrices for mesh types + (1 * 35 * 250) matrices for mesh instances
= 2025 + 3500 + 8750 = 14275 matrices (upper limit)

4 * 4 * 4 bytes/matrix = 64 bytes / matrix
= 913600 bytes for meshes

or about 1 MB (accounting for extra data) to hold almost as many meshes as you could ever want

Sounds extremely efficient! Good work!

Karl,

Congrats on the animation system! It looks like things are coming along for you. Do you need an SSE implementation of software skinning? I happen to have one that I wrote a while ago. It's about 29x faster than the standard x87 FPU and requires a Pentium-III or better.

Patrick Baggett
baggett.patrick@figglesoftware.com

Hey Patrick,

Thanks for the offer--I'd love to have a look at the code! Send me an email (karlgluck@gmail.com) and we can chat about it.

Look forward to hearing from you.