Zhixing
Aug.7, 2009

I has been reading a book named "Ultimate Game programming with DirectX" in my spare time these past 2 months. Although somebody said that this book is actually not so good as it contains too much contents but lacks of lucubrating on either specific content, I still think that I have got lots of instructional information from it.

And I have also built a simple game engine "istarEngine" which is based on the "strandedEngine" project mentioned in the book. The whole organization of "istarEngine" is almost the same as the "strandedEngine" except some tiny differences on a few components, but most of the codes were re-wrote by me to add new functionalities or to unified the codes or to enhance the holistic performance.

The main features of istarEngine now are listed as below:
-Route/Path animation
-FPSCamera
-Simple GUI System(Supported controls: Backdrop, Text, Button and Label)
-The common input device support(Keyboard, mouse and joystick)
-Logger
-MathLib(Vector3, Matrix4X4, Quaternion, Plane, Ray and frustum)
-Model loading(Supported formats: .obj, .x with animation)
-Simple particle system
-Physics(Box collider, sphere collider and force-applying)
-Material, Lighting, Muti-Texture, Details-Mapping, Fog, Multi-Sampling
-The function to take screenshots
-Scripting(Property script and command script)
-Audio(Based on XAudio, to be done in the later phase)

I am also building a game demo "Energy of Dragon" using the engine, the picture below is an in-game screenshot

(I know, it looks awful now as it is just the beginning version of the game demo "EOD", more functionality and more models will be added into it in the later days)