Monday, January 17, 2011

End of a project

This will be my last post about the ray tracer for a while since I will no longer be working on it. I have been slowly working on it for a while now and I have gotten to a point where I am happy with what I have accomplished but I need to move on to something new. This something new will be an XNA game that will hopefully be able to ship as an XBox Live Indie Game someday.

As you can see from the image I was able to get a 3D polygonal model loaded up and rendering. I used the ms3d format for the model since it is a very simple and easy to use model format. also the texture is a 24 bit uncompressed tga for similar ease of use reasons. Getting the ray tracer to this point was a lot of fun. I would recommend that anyone who has any interest in writing a ray tracer should give it a go. At very least you could spend a day and get some reflective spheres drawing and looking awesome! If you have any questions about how it all works or what I did feel free to ask anything in the comments.

For the next project I think its going to be a 2D platformer type game (probably 2D rendered on 3D planes). As for specifics of the gameplay and design that is still being worked out but I will have time to take care of all that while I am working on the initial tech for the game. Also I will be working with the house mates for design and content on the game. I am hoping that this will be a very fun project to work on in my free time.