Things are moving fast now. I've completed skinning, it should work perfectly on any graphics card now.

I have also spent a fair amount of time mucking around with the windows message loop... why? Well I want screen resizing and alt-tabbing to work properly. I don't have a clean solution yet but I do at least have a temporary one which will get me through the competition. The clean solution is too reset the direct 3d device which involves destroying and recreating everything in video memory. Not a small task but not a difficult one either; I just have more important things to do with my time - Space Crusade perchance.

Far more important than alt-tabbing is animation. Having worked like a demon on it I can almost (but not quite) say it's finished. Technically the animation does work, it's just the setup which doesn't.

That is beause I've got the sub objects local position and rotations setup in the wrong frame of reference. They should be in world space but, alas, my understanding quaternions is limited. I need quaternions for rotation but when I make the transform matrix from a position and rotation I don't get quite what I expect. On the brighter side I have now added a quaternion library ;)

As far as animation goes it's very flexible: the same animation routines can be used to flip between cels in a textured animation as can be used to do vector interpolation. It's based heavily on the code I wrote for Creatures 2 which was going to be my entry into the 2004 competition. Unfortunately the computer with that code on was stolen (Hey justin - do you have any of the art from creatures anymore?)

There are no screen shots this time 'round. There's nothing particularly interesting to see except possibly a bent cylinder which I'm to lazy to screenshot.

And that's it from me now. I'm going to go and sleep on the quaternion problem (I can vaguely see a solution but it's not quite there yet). So...

Later!