Enough with shaders - back to Witch Training

I have been going through different phases trying to learn about shaders. They are very important for learning about how 3d engines works.  I have read about half of the FREE CG book from NVidia as well as the OpenGL ES 2.0 book. The CG book author does a great job explaining everything. The OpenGL ES book wasn’t that great for a beginning. There aren’t any good books that teach you by writing a lot of scripts.

A lot of OpenGL applies to WebGL as well. Since I am a multimedia designer/developer at my job, I thought it would be a great skill to learn. After a bit of tinkering around with using different javascript frameworks like jsScene and GLGE, I am starting to think that WebGL isn’t quite there yet in terms of being very adoptable and viable for most 3d applications it might have.  Support is just too spotty right now for different browsers. I have read that all new browsers support WebGL, but they seem to support different features and specifications. It seems impossible to know what direction will be used. I am sure there will eventually be something great like jQuery that will be simple to use once WebGL becomes a little more concrete. I will try and re-learn it when it matures more.

Unity3d - Witch Training Again

Unity3D has again kindled my drive for learning more about 3d. The information I read on shaders will certainly be helpful for texturing and effects when I get to that stage.  I am very interested right now in seeing what it takes to create a map. A lot of posts and forums say they have to be square and there is nothing like a stencil buffer to be able to “mask” out anything. The bootcamp demo that comes with Unity3d shows it is obviously possible.

I will incorporate that into Witch Training. Maybe I will write a post on it showing how it works. I also want some more interaction in the game, so I might add an enemy and learn a little more about enemy artificial intelligence.My buildings are looking pretty boring, so I might spruce them up a little bit. I ordered A Visual Dictionary for Architecture and am excited to learn more about what makes buildings work. The Google code project will start seeing some action again in the near future.