This week: Graphics!

The graphics team has been busy the last couple of weeks. Now that we finally have the project set up, we could start working on graphics features. Our sprint goal was to get a rotating cube that was rendered using the new entity component system. In the first week we didn't have a solid API, so each renderer had to use a hardcoded mesh. Once we had that going we continued with making it more dynamic.

We added a component system that handles rendering of meshes and forwards the rendering requests to a platform renderer. The system is able to link meshes with materials and transforms (for moving the objects) and render them through a specific camera. Using this system we are able to render the same things on PC and on the PS4!

Unfortunately, it doesn't look very good without lighting so to make it look a bit better we added a hardcoded light in each of renderers. In the coming weeks we will make materials run through the system as well, so these also look exactly the same.

It was time for some textures, we quickly added some texture support and ran it through the component system. It is a simple checkerboard texture generated in code. (As we can't load it from disk yet...) This texture is sent to the platform renderers and drawn onto each mesh.

Now, here are some cool videos of the renderers in action!

(Yes they are identical :D)