Tesla Graphics Engine

                    Monday night document dump! I have uploaded a (brief) introduction to the engine’s content pipeline on googlecode. The document discusses the content manager, types of assets, and gives an overview of ISavable serialization (as well as all the associated interfaces, and dives somewhat into the [...]

Just pushed a series of commits to the subversion repository, which bring many enhancements (mostly minor) notably changes to material parsing. I completely redesigned and rewrote the parser to be better organized, more stable, and more efficient. In addition, it supports just about all the items left on my TODO list: 1. Comment parsing is [...]

Thought I’d give the blog a spin for a change, since I’ve moved most of my updates to the twitter feed. Work on Tesla is a bit slow, but steady as I’m currently juggling three different projects. The past week I thought I’d take a break from the drudgery and actually do some cool graphics [...]

So half a week ago I began experimenting with rendering Bitmap (or just BM) fonts. Bitmap fonts are nothing more than a texture atlas with all your characters and some file that contains each character’s UV coordinates, spacing values, and kerning pairs (to adjust spacing between specific characters). The engine has been sorely lacking any [...]

Just added a tool to the SVN that I developed several months ago (cleaned it up a bit, added some additional user-friendly settings) to compile the engine’s shader libraries into the binary TEBO files found in the D3D10/XNA default content. As an added bonus, the source code for all the engine shader implementations are included. [...]

Introducing the newly re-skinned and feature improved site! I can admin I don’t have a knack for web development (seems like I waste so much time getting something up that by the time I’m done, I’m already dissatisfied with it!). We’re still running wordpress, but with buddypress plugins. I actually like the default buddypress theme [...]

(Caution: Long post) Background In computer graphics the term “Material” tends to get thrown around as something that describes the texture or color of an object, and so tends to be very vague. The concept of materials has been something that I’ve wrestled with way back in the old days of Spark Engine, mostly because [...]

I was asked the other day if there was a sample project, such as a “Hello World” to get started with using the engine. I am working on a sample browser where you’re able to adjust renderer parameters and choose a sample to run, although that’s not yet ready for release. In the meantime however, [...]

In the last post, I explained that Tesla uses the concept of services, rather than singleton managers. Perhaps the best example of this is the render system. This post will go into more details about the Tesla.Graphics and Tesla.Graphics.Renderer ... [More] namespaces and the differences between the two. Graphics System Tesla’s graphics API has two goals in [...] [Less]

From the beginning, the goal for Tesla was to write an abstraction layer for the graphics system. I also wanted the primary engine assembly to be pure C# and not rely on any unmanaged code. This would make porting it from .NET to Mono easier in the future, for OpenGL. So the question that I [...]