March 13th, 2012

I have begun upgrading the rendering system to be more flexible. It was a bit limited as it dynamically batched everything that was not statically batched. It worked fine for tentacles as the things that was batched were small meshes, like quads, but for our new project - and more generally - it was just too expensive. The new system will allow for flexible dynamic batching, and using the "Skinned Effect trick" for better performance.

Also - check out the new tests in the FFWD.Unity.Tests project. It shows off and tests lightmapping, skinned animation and basic rendering stuff. I will update this project with more test scenes as we go.

March 9th, 2012

It just seemed like I could go on and polish for ages without releasing! I have focused on making it easy to get started with the engine, so I hope that at least is reasonably good. Apart from that, the engine should be usable. I mean - we have builds running with our new project using it. Recently there have been some changes to the rendering, as this is where my focus is at the moment. The rendering we did for Tentacles was quite basic, and now we want to use more effects and utilize materials and built-in shaders more. That part is not done yet, and somewhat rough - perhaps even broken.

We are looking for small precise functionality demos for FFWD. Both for things that is working, and things that are not. So if you want to contribute you can make a small Unity scene in the Test project - export it with FFWD and give us a pull request. That way it should be easier for us to find and fix those kinks. This goes for both scripting and built in functionality.

Thomas Gravgaard