I only managed to put about a week's worth of work into this before I realized our web hosting account was due for deletion, but I managed to knock out a good few things:

First off, I'm happy to say I finally debugged the error with textures. Apparently it was just a misplaced macro, with a name similar to the one I should've been using. In the process of messing around with class TEXTURE, I threw in two alpha-texturing modes, and made it possible to load a texture to/from a matrix<rgba> object. I attempted to throw in scene-capturing, too, but that's still incomplete. I also managed to set up internal texture management for the class. However, I can't really say it's fully debugged, since I still need to work around OpenGL's tendency to require all textures to be generated at once. Chances are there IS no work-around, and I'll have to buckle and come up with a way to accommodate that.

The THREAD and THREADPOOL classes are coming along quite well structurally, but I have yet to do any decent testing with them. I plan on adding a locking mechanism to the class set at some point, and by then they should be seaworthy. Also, the DAquScript engine is still under construction, but finally has a parser. At some point I'll have a chance to test it out, and then actually try to do something with the commands it can read. I'm debating right now as to whether or not I want it to have C/C++-style or PHP-style syntax... I might make it a hybrid of sorts. Whatever works for the engine.

Well, those are the major points I wanted to touch up on. Until next time~

-Blue

Wow, it's been quite a while! ^^; Sorry it's been so long...life kinda took over for a bit, but we're getting back on track, and the way things are progressing, DigitalAqua Dev might be heading towards a really good and productive year. :)

BLUEngn has been going through a good deal of changes over the summer, mostly due to us finally porting it over to Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 from Visual Studio 6. Much of the way the templates work has been altered, particularly with the incorporation of the new classes "number" and "const_number<>" in the math algorithms. Texturing seems to be the major concern right now, since somewhere in the port, the algorithms for that stopped working properly. It shouldn't be too difficult or drastic to fix; we'll keep you updated. On a positive note, errors in memory allocation and memory leaks have completely dissappeared, but we'll see how long that lasts. Memory management failure just loves to sneak up on ya :)

I finally managed to get this train rollin' again. Chapter 3 of Arson is pretty much complete, and should be posted shortly, and I finally fixed those darn "<div>" tag glitches that kept showing up in Internet Explorer. Hopefully I'll be able to hit up the new Web Development pages soon.

More importantly, I managed to make some modest progress with BLUEngn. The license and copyrights are updated, and that infernal 0x3 error, although still present *sigh*, only presents itself in one thread (NTDLL.DLL). I'll probably post a new build (BETA 0.1) once I fix whatever I did to the TEXTURE class, which I'm debugging now. Additionally, I'm putting together a new computer to add to my rig, on which I'll be running Red Hat Fedora Linux, so I'll be able to start working on Linux support. There might still be some hope yet for a solid, error-free build of BLUEngn within the year, so keep your fingers crossed!

Consider this our early Christmas present to you! You can download it from the downloads page of the BLUEngn part of the site!

Yep, it's official: the first Beta build of BLUEngn will be released during the week of Christmas! Mark that week on your calendar, folks!

I'm happy to announce that I'll be able to set up a kappa release of BLUEngn possibly within the next few weeks. I call it a kappa release because referring to it as a beta would imply that this is a test version of the final product, and it isn't. It sooooo isn't. This build will be released to give you all a feel for how the engine is meant to be set up. It won't have full functionality (understatement of the century :P), and there will be plenty of bugs, but it will be open-source and free for personal use. Also, if you'd like to contribute any ideas, code, or add-ons to the engine, I'd really appreciate it! You can contact me via email at i_sniff_blue@digitalaquadev.net. You can keep checking the site and forums for more info and a possible release date.

As of right now, all POLYGON classes and class OBJECT are fully operational, though there are some memory leaks still being worked out. The TEXT class is going through a total revamp (no more raster fonts; using textures now). The TEXTURE class is being modified to support environment mapping and other features. I'm putting a temporary halt on the development of the script classes, since their no good if the engine doesn't work, so the MODEL class cannot do scripted actions. The pixel shaders still haven't been made, and the virtual light class still hasn't been created, so the engine is still dependent on OpenGL's built-in lighting system, but at least now all the lighting is done correctly. This also means shadowing isn't supported. The array, matrix, string, and clock classes are still working, and the window-related classes (WINDOWCLASS, KEYBOARD, MOUSE, etc.) are still working perfectly; in fact, WINDOWCLASS now has the ability generate child windows, though there are still bugs being worked out for that feature. The ENVIRONMENT class is currently being modified to support a SkyBox/SkyDome. Work is underway for joystick support. Audio and video are still not supported. Particles still not supported. HDR not supported.

Well, if it hasn't already been made obvious, the official first build of BLUEngn won't be done anytime soon. It's not that I can't handle the workload (although working on an engine all by yourself is quite a struggle), it's just that there are a number of other things going on right now, including a move and a job search, and eventually a job. I can't really lay down a date for the first build of the engine, but I can promise you I WILL get it done...I didn't come this far for nothin'! In the meantime, though, I will release beta builds every time I feel the features that are already in the engine run smoothly and are solid enough to release to the public, and I'll throw in tutorials with the package, since making a documentation would just take even longer. I might not let the betas stay open-source, though, since registering code for copyrights cost money. I'll announce if and when I release a beta build.

Models and Environments are working. The script engine structure is underway, with plans for script types and an inheritance structure for scripted class types. Still working on fixing the lighting defects with the quadrics. Also debugging the Environment and Model classes Saving and Loading algos (binary write issue with script::variable class).