Hi,
No, there's not much to the update - I have been working on other things which will *eventually* benefit all Blitz products.
There has also been a certain amount of 'politicing' going on behind the scenes over the past year which has consumed far more time than I would have liked.
Cubemapping should be as fast as regular texture mapping. However, dynamically altering cubemaps will be as slow as dynamically altering regular textures. I recommend making sure the mipmap flag isn't set (as any alteration will cause mipmaps to be rebuilt) and/or only refreshing one face per frame or even every N'th frame.
The reason Blitz has never offered a 'render directly to buffer' option is because it is/was broken on many cards/drivers. This situation may have changed by now, but I wouldn't bet on it. This is one of several cases in Blitz3D's design where I have made a deliberate decision to sacrifice (hypothetical) performance for the sake of compatiblity. Such decisions are my call, and I stand by them! Although I understand how others may disagree...
Dot3 blending is 'unofficial'. Blitz3D's current design makes it too tricky to implement proper, generalized dot3 bumpmaps (ie: normals in 'surface space') lit by multiple lights, so I was faced with the decision to either remove plain dot3 blending or leave it in for the community to 'unofficially' play with. I left it in.
Another option would have been to provide some kind of kludge for half-arsed 'one light/object space' dot3 bumpmaps - but I'd rather spend the time working on the real thing.
I am reluctant to charge for Blitz updates, as I would therefore feel obliged to provide them (!) and this would distract me from what I feel is the 'greater good'.
I guess the bottom line is that I have my own intuition of where Blitz needs to go, and you guys are just gonna have to trust me!
Mark
No, there's not much to the update - I have been working on other things which will *eventually* benefit all Blitz products.
There has also been a certain amount of 'politicing' going on behind the scenes over the past year which has consumed far more time than I would have liked.
Cubemapping should be as fast as regular texture mapping. However, dynamically altering cubemaps will be as slow as dynamically altering regular textures. I recommend making sure the mipmap flag isn't set (as any alteration will cause mipmaps to be rebuilt) and/or only refreshing one face per frame or even every N'th frame.
The reason Blitz has never offered a 'render directly to buffer' option is because it is/was broken on many cards/drivers. This situation may have changed by now, but I wouldn't bet on it. This is one of several cases in Blitz3D's design where I have made a deliberate decision to sacrifice (hypothetical) performance for the sake of compatiblity. Such decisions are my call, and I stand by them! Although I understand how others may disagree...
Dot3 blending is 'unofficial'. Blitz3D's current design makes it too tricky to implement proper, generalized dot3 bumpmaps (ie: normals in 'surface space') lit by multiple lights, so I was faced with the decision to either remove plain dot3 blending or leave it in for the community to 'unofficially' play with. I left it in.
Another option would have been to provide some kind of kludge for half-arsed 'one light/object space' dot3 bumpmaps - but I'd rather spend the time working on the real thing.
I am reluctant to charge for Blitz updates, as I would therefore feel obliged to provide them (!) and this would distract me from what I feel is the 'greater good'.
I guess the bottom line is that I have my own intuition of where Blitz needs to go, and you guys are just gonna have to trust me!
Mark