Life on the Other Side

I'm still here and the framework is getting better and better!

Except for a couple of trips to Isola d'Elba I've spent my summer working on different engine/framework designs.

The framework is the testbed for new things which could (or could not) find their way into the engine. As for the features I've been implementing in my framework, let me name two:

- DX10 support
- multithreaded rendering pipeline (work in progress)

As for D3D10, it took just a couple of days to implement the rendering subsystem. It's far from perfect but the tests look promising. For simple scenes the speed is comparable of the one I get with the old D3D9 subsystem.
A more complex scene where hundreds of objects to be rendered is up to 3 times faster in D3D10!

Multithreading the framework took a lot of time for designing and 5 different implementations to get a decent level of independency. ATM there's only separation beetween the scene thread and the rendering thread. The speed increase is approx 5-10%, but the scene thread is lightweight so I expect to see major improvements when the entities will feature complex behaviour.

On the scene side, I'm in the process of completing the design (and of course the implementation) of the entities update. The ultimate goal is to be able to independently update the entities (in theory with pools containing N entities).

I don't expect to need this level of control on granularity, but I'd like the system to be enough flexible to easily support it.

The part I'm working on right now is, as I said, the way an entity can be updated.

The idea is to let an entity expose different parameter sets, then only work on them so that the code is as much reusable as possible.

FROM a multithreaded POV, the parameters update processes could be grouped (think about a job pool) and executed independently, then the current scene gets rendered.

Thus the multithreading involves two different levels:

level 1: job pools -> scene
level 2: scene -> rendering pipeline

Hopefully next week I'll have the final design and implementation.

I still think it would be cool to write a serie of posts about how the framework has been implemented and designed, but I'd like to complete the overall design before writing them.