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May 27th, 2009:

A rant!

Ok, what the hell were id software’s designers thinking about when they plotted the material files?

I was happy this morning, you know, with my models loading and that things, and i’ve said “hey, wired models are cool, but properly textured models are cooler!” So this noon i’ve started to look to how materials are handled in this otherwise, pretty simple file format.

Imagine my surprise when i’ve found something like:
shader “path_to_a_shader/shader_name”
and only that!

I’ve thought, ok, there must be a file named “shader_name” so I can make an n:1 relation, easy, right? Well, no. Don’t get me wrong at Insideo we had something similar to, each mesh had a reference name to a material, but there was 1 file for each material!

At id thought that it was a bad idea doing it that way, that probably having tons of files would be a bad idea (and I can agree with that). So their solution? having files with a bunch of material definitions there, you can find something like a file named “chars_common.mtr” with that “shader_name” definition in it!!

WTF! ok, I’m ranting just due the frustration of something that could be better. I mean, was that hard to have some kind of translation table? something like “you can find shader_name in the file chars_common.mtr”? In theory what you download with the demo are somewhat production files, aren’t they?

Bah, I suppose they have that table, but they keep it somewhere hidden :) :). Well, as I don’t find it, this means I will code that table tomorrow morning. Now it’s time to go to see how  F.C Barcelona beats Manchester United and we become champions.

Status Update

Yesterday was a happy day :) As I stated in my previous post, I hadn’t tested any of all the code i had written, so yesterday (and the day before yesterday, and in fact the whole weekend) I was commited to test the loader and the shiny new math library.

Obviously it had bugs, several bugs. I spent a whole day with the quaternion class, unit testing it, and testing and testing again. I’m not able to visualize quaternions so it’s hard for me to test them or knowing what to expect when i set a watch in a quaternion during a debugging session :(.

I’m a firm believer that when you’re going to test something, start with simple cases, and later on, you can test harder and more complicated things. So being sure that quaternions were wrong, and that if i tried to test the md5 models i would be completely lost, on monday I decided to add the “feature” of being able to generate simple geometry on the fly (currently only cubes :) and start the testing session.

Da cuba man!

Da cuba man!

Yeah, i know, it’s not impressive, but it helped me to test if rotations were working ok (which weren’t) and if translation obeyed my commands (which, surprisingly, didn’t either). Once everything seemed ok I thought “Toni, it’s time to load the jeep md5 model” . And I did, and … the result was less impressive, or probably for some abstract artists, pure art :P

Abstract art

Abstract art

Ok, there was some problems there, so I went back to quaternions and they were ok, I looked at the loader, and seemed ok, I even wrote several debugging functions to get the state of the mesh… everythin ok. So where was the problem? Mesh indexes seemed to be completely messed up :| so I fixed that and…. Voilá

A wired jeep

A wired jeep

Ok, it’s not shaded and … it looks a bit… clumpsy :) but I like it :) now I can move forward to my deferred renderer, but first I will need to import md5 materials :)

And here end my status update, stay tuned!