What are the people at WLE up to now?
by Vince Gee · 03/16/2014 (9:01 pm) · 3 comments
So here I sit at my computer, 11:30 on a Sunday night and I'm tired as all get out. Of late this has been a reoccurring theme. I know I have a wife, I think. It's amazing how easy it is to forget about time and your problems when you're programming. Well to get onto the meat of things, our team has been preparing the Omni Framework for primetime.
Our new engine has two parts now. Originally we were just improving the C# side of things. Streamlining code, making it completely object oriented, squashing bugs, etc. All of it pertained to the C# side of things. I took all the feedback I had received from all of our owners and fixed stuff. I must say I am very pleased with what came out of it, it is so much easier to understand.
One of the other features that came out of it was "Just-In-Time" compilation of C# code. I added a new feature to the Omni Framework that lets you modify C# code while the engine is running. Say you working on a new part of code and you don't want to restart the engine every time you find a bug or make a change. You can now edit it and when you save it the Omni Framework traps the file change event and recompiles the code in memory, does cleanup for any objects created with the old version and makes the new version available. It's pretty neat and it really simplifies writing stuff for gui's and such.
There were many other things done but that one was by far the coolest. Imagine, let's say you are building a game where you have Quests in the game. With a little preparation, you could write each quest as a class file and then run it. If it doesn't work correctly, you just tweak the code, save it and then trigger it again. No more restarting the server every time you want to tweak something. Just like TorqueScript!
The second part of the engine is the C++. Part of our job at WLE is to keep our engine code up to date with the main branch of T3D. It would be foolish of us to release our version of the engine if it wasn't up to date with all the fixes currently out there.
The hard part with all of this is the fact that we have rewritten a good bit of the code inside the engine. Sometimes they aren't an easy fit, the code just doesn't line up. Sometimes the offending code doesn't exist due to a complete re-write of the code. But these things happen.
So much has been done it can be quite a daunting task to track it all. Dusan is doing an amazing job of taking the shaders and related code to the next level. Really, my hat is off to that man.
I don't know how the community plans to handle the win32/64 bit build configurations, but boy has that been a uphill battle to get sorted, The Leap libraries are the worst.
Don't even get me started on the math inside T3D. Last week was Math week here at WLE and poor Dusan had to muddle through some of the broken math inside stock T3D. In the end we ended up just rewriting a good bit of the math to fix the problems, but wow, pain.
One of the cool things that did get added was a far clipping option. So players could modify how far out things would be rendered from them. This is quite helpful for people using slower computers. Then you have the resource library tool we added which lets you see all the assets loaded in a cleaner format than stock.
Separate from Omni, OneWorld has been seeing quite a bit of action of late. I assisted a developer with merging OneWorld with AFX this week. I must say I learned some cool stuff looking at what the developer was doing with the code. It never ceases to amaze me what the people who buy are products do with them.
Well, I need to get some sleep, but stay tuned, some big things will be happening on the WLE front over the next month! I promise they will be exciting.
In the meantime, here is a picture of a bunny to keep you occupied.
Vince
Winterleaf Entertainment L.L.C.
Our new engine has two parts now. Originally we were just improving the C# side of things. Streamlining code, making it completely object oriented, squashing bugs, etc. All of it pertained to the C# side of things. I took all the feedback I had received from all of our owners and fixed stuff. I must say I am very pleased with what came out of it, it is so much easier to understand.
One of the other features that came out of it was "Just-In-Time" compilation of C# code. I added a new feature to the Omni Framework that lets you modify C# code while the engine is running. Say you working on a new part of code and you don't want to restart the engine every time you find a bug or make a change. You can now edit it and when you save it the Omni Framework traps the file change event and recompiles the code in memory, does cleanup for any objects created with the old version and makes the new version available. It's pretty neat and it really simplifies writing stuff for gui's and such.
There were many other things done but that one was by far the coolest. Imagine, let's say you are building a game where you have Quests in the game. With a little preparation, you could write each quest as a class file and then run it. If it doesn't work correctly, you just tweak the code, save it and then trigger it again. No more restarting the server every time you want to tweak something. Just like TorqueScript!
The second part of the engine is the C++. Part of our job at WLE is to keep our engine code up to date with the main branch of T3D. It would be foolish of us to release our version of the engine if it wasn't up to date with all the fixes currently out there.
The hard part with all of this is the fact that we have rewritten a good bit of the code inside the engine. Sometimes they aren't an easy fit, the code just doesn't line up. Sometimes the offending code doesn't exist due to a complete re-write of the code. But these things happen.
So much has been done it can be quite a daunting task to track it all. Dusan is doing an amazing job of taking the shaders and related code to the next level. Really, my hat is off to that man.
I don't know how the community plans to handle the win32/64 bit build configurations, but boy has that been a uphill battle to get sorted, The Leap libraries are the worst.
Don't even get me started on the math inside T3D. Last week was Math week here at WLE and poor Dusan had to muddle through some of the broken math inside stock T3D. In the end we ended up just rewriting a good bit of the math to fix the problems, but wow, pain.
One of the cool things that did get added was a far clipping option. So players could modify how far out things would be rendered from them. This is quite helpful for people using slower computers. Then you have the resource library tool we added which lets you see all the assets loaded in a cleaner format than stock.
Separate from Omni, OneWorld has been seeing quite a bit of action of late. I assisted a developer with merging OneWorld with AFX this week. I must say I learned some cool stuff looking at what the developer was doing with the code. It never ceases to amaze me what the people who buy are products do with them.
Well, I need to get some sleep, but stay tuned, some big things will be happening on the WLE front over the next month! I promise they will be exciting.
In the meantime, here is a picture of a bunny to keep you occupied.
Vince
Winterleaf Entertainment L.L.C.
About the author
www.winterleafentertainment.com
#2
03/17/2014 (9:34 am)
Sounds good! Can't wait to test the buildings and props, I make for WLE, in the new engine. The bunny looks cool :) 
#3
Anyway, awesome to your progress. Keep pushing the envelope!
03/18/2014 (1:33 pm)
That bunny is the result of the Hairy Monster and Bugs Bunny off screen shenanigans... You know the alien one with Marvin the Martian.Anyway, awesome to your progress. Keep pushing the envelope!
Torque Owner Stephen
GearedMind Studio