Bishan Model by Bobby Kwakkernaat
Hey everyone!
A good month has passed since my last post! But I can assure you that I’m still alive and kicking, and so is Piko3D! I have been working on Angelscript for a bit as I explained in my last post. Witchlord had already committed some of my changes to the WIP version of angelscript, which you can find here. There’s still some work to do on that front, but I thought it was important to give my readers at Piko3D.com something nice to look at 😀
As some of you know, I wrote a tutorial on LibPNG and how I used it in Piko3D. Well I thought it was time to put  these images to use, and write support for texture loading! Loading a texture is not much work in itself, but I didn’t want a quick and dirty fix. I wanted something worthy of the dynamic lill 3D engine Piko3D is going to be. So I wrote a little setup for dynamically loading and unloading, as well as caching of textures, with a bit of management structure behind it that I can use to manage other GPU bound resources as well. Like shader programs, vertex array  buffers etc, in the future.
Piko3D doesn’t have much of a renderer yet… Everything you see in the screen shots is actually debug visualisation.  Piko3D will have at least an OpenGL ES 2.0 and OpenGL 3.0 (or 3.2) shader based render pipeline that I will start on later. It would sure be visually interesting,  but I think a solid base for it is important, and a 3D game engine is more then just the renderer 🙂  Because of this, the textured model renders are unlit.  I did get my hands on a nice 3D model named “Bishan”, created by Bobby Kwakkernaat from http://www.decentdesign.nl . This is at least a very nice piece of geometry you guys can feast your eyes on.
Well, I think I’ll be going back to working some more on Angelscript for now. I want to use that in Piko3D so I want to help to extend it a bit further to suit my own selfish desires ;P Oh and I have to feed my game addiction from time to time too…(Like with Brutal Legend and Uncharted at the moment :P)
Talk to you later!
Wracky.
