xcore, mingl, xgfx

Not much to update today; Started some new projects.

In the spirit of the IGTL::Sys classes I made (mostly copy paste from them since they're so dang useful), I am building xcore, which is responsible for:

1. OS level byte types
2. exceptions and error reporting
3. CPU identification, SSE intrinsic math and special instructions
4. Memory manager
5. Specialized templated common file structures, like index_array, carray, index_deque, string_table
6. Directory I/O and file I/O

XCore is the minimal utility toolkit that drives all of my programming. On top of XCore is an important layer called GHOST, which was coded by the blender foundation and furthur extended by me for my own projects. GHOST is a cross platform windowing toolkit that accomplishes some of these things, but not all of them. I'm using it religiously since it avoids stupid SDL licensing issues, and has support for context sharing, multiple windows, and a better event system. The nice thing is, since I use blender anyways to make all of my media, it'll be a cinch to always mention i am using code from blender, thus keeping in line with their license for distribution.

mingl is a minimum wrapper on top of OpenGL that completly abstracts it, preventing me from making any non-suppported OpenGL calls. For example, it wraps all geometry data as a vbo/ibo/vao class (read up on OpenGL 3.0 if you don't know what these are) and internally can down-support any openGL version using this system. It cannot abstract shades really well, so it looks like it will require GL 2.0+ for any shaders to even work. I'm also not sure yet if I need to write my own shader coders so that the engine can generate shaders for vertex/fragment program aas well as GLSL; This seems a little difficult at the moment so I'll defer it.

xgfx is the graphics engine that performs culling, scene management, mesh updating, keyframing, armature animations, lighting, shadowing, and all the regular crap you expect to have in a game engine.

So, with this toolchain of xcore/ mingl/ xgfx /xoal/ xnet, it should abstract all the things I need for any game, just like I did back in late 2005. Except this time, it'll be my engine with no rules and no hangups or lies to slow me down. Of other importance, it's all using C++ as much as possible, so each component should be independent as much as possible.

Z out.