My focus the last few days has been on level design, specifically the pipeline to place entities, lights, spawn points, etc. The bsp pipeline that was in place was great for static level geo, but I was getting tired of the distance between design and seeing how it actually looked and behaved in-game.
I decided to throw out bsp entirely for this branch. It just didn't fit in with the style of the rest of the project. Especially the code because it wasn't my code. I pulled code from an example somewhere and the bsp loader was code pulled from the original quake3 trunk. Extending the bsp loader wouldn't required digging into the binary lumps and doing a bunch of low-level parsing to get at the entities. I probably could have done it, but I'd rather create my own parser from scratch. Learn more.
I spent a good amount of time learning maxscript, considering writing an exporter, but ultimately threw that idea aside due to the lengthy learning curve and time concerns. Like I said in an earlier post, I think I will enjoy creating my own in-game level editor.
The visual look and feel of kyuplex is very simple and geometric, therefore it is very important that I be able to see exactly how it will look and feel as I develop. Here is a precise example of this concept:
I created a kxQuadPlane mesh scene node with vertices dedicated to each triangle so that I could use vertex coloring and create sharp lines and divisions between colors, as well as animate each face separately. Here is a shot of the in-game comparison between the quad plane and just a regular plane with a 1024x1024 texture applied.
The look of the quad plane is disappointing. Perhaps there is a way to smooth out those jagged lines. But the texture plane picks up a lot of blurring at angle and distance:
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