Oooh, real staars...

Today is a weird day. I'm getting all of my work done really late after lunch. The morning was spend checking in my code from last night and doing some computer futzing so that I can check in and out directly from my laptop. It's better than copying all my stuff over to the main machine and sorting it out. Cari's done some phenomenal work on the background and nebulae. It looks really cool.

So, on to the work:
I spent most of the morning/lunch time tracking down a DX9 issue with the selection cursors. They wouldn't show up for any objects except the first to be drawn. You could also get them to pop in and out when certain objects weren't on the screen. A real pain. It turns out that it was a one line fix, just hard to find. We were seeing a problem with the texture coordinates like this:

The fix was to add this line before the DrawPrimitive....
   pDevice->SetFVF(VERTEX_FVF);
It turns out that we were using some older FVF. Most likely from the last object drawn. That explains why it worked sometimes, and not others. Ugh. At least it works. Here's what it looks like now:

On to some more cool stuff...
I helped Cari get the parallax working. It looks pretty cool. On thing I learned about DX, you can't use texture transforms on a transformed vertex. That makes sense, because the texture calculation would be done during the transform stage. So, instead of doing the easy TextureTransform method, Cari has to modify the texture coordinates for the background manually. That's fine and cool, it'd just be nicer if we didn't have to muck with the vertices.

We had our weekly development meeting. We're doing pretty good for the demo, but I'll be adding in some cool stuff to make the planets look that much sweeter

I added in Alex's stars. Check them out. They're big! There was a concern that they might be too big and would totally obscure the ships behind them, but I don't think that'll be an issue. Do you? They take up 4 tiles so the user can't move too close.

I also moved everything to the ground layer and fixed a few bugs with the nebula layer. There's still more to do, but in order to add the cool stuff, like rings and moons, I'll have to spend some time redoing our object hierarchy. Actually, I'll be adding an object hierarchy I think I'll use D3DXFRAME as my base.