Soon after my experience at CINECA, I took the decision to implement my own 3D engine.I'm not trying to develop the ultimate graphic experience, of course. I just wanna own a set of libraries useful for easily handling and displaying scientific information, without too much effort.
Actually, I tried to avoid the huge effort of programming a whole 3D framework from scratch by using OpenSceneGraph; well, I tried, but it turned out that making it work was going to take more time than coding my own! Furthermore, I probably won't make always use of a scenegraph for my representations, so here we go.
The first thing I focused on are shaders: PLT is going to be a GLSL-centric engine. The fixed pipeline is still supported, more or less, but there's no future for it, and it's time to leave it alone.
Besides the qualitative leap that shaders allow (the screenshot shows a comparison between fixed functionality and a phong-blinn lighting), there's another huge benefit: the engine can easily be ported onto embedded systems. That's the second aspect I'm focusing on: portability. I want PLT to run on every system I could code on: Windows, Linux, and Windows Mobile.
What misses at the moment? A true geometry loader, for instance. There's already full support for vertex buffer objects, and I can manually load vertexes, normals and so on, but I must code at least an handy .OBJ loader.
As I told, there's no a scene graph, not even a rudimentary one. I'll surely need a bunch of matrix functions for manipulating my objects loaded server-side.
And naturally, I'm going to extend the PLTlights classes for shadow maps support as soon as possible! :)
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