Archive for March, 2010

MOCing around with vftable errors

March 26th, 2010

In case you ever do some Qt programming, and work with QObjects (needed for Qt’s signals and slots), you might run over a strange compiler error, something like “bla bla bla vftable bla bla” (sorry, but I don’t have the exact error message in my head…if I reproduce the error sometime, I’ll update my post).
The clue is, instead of searching for errors in your code, just delete all the MOC and other generated files, clean the solution and rebuild it.
The error should be gone…

Other than that, I really like Qt and Qt Creator. It simplifies life big time! At least as far as it can get with C++ (silent hoooorraayyy for C# ;) ).

Configuring Notepad++ for pbelevel format

March 23rd, 2010

I use Notepad++ for viewing my *.pbelevel files, and always had to do the extra clicking “Language >> XML” to configure it, to display the file with XML highlighting. I now found out, how one can configure Notepad++ to do this automatically: locate the langs.xml in your Notepad++ install directory and add the following line:

<Language name="xml"  ext="pbelevel"></Language>

And tada – you’re off to go!

Refactoring the Master – Part II

March 20th, 2010

Actually, it’s more a redesign, but as part of the refactoring process, I also integrated group support to the Entity Explorer. And this led me to this new layout (left:new, right:old):

New version of Entity Explorer Old version of the Entity Explorer

As you can see, the components of an entity are now listed in the lower table view. The tooltip of the class column shows the whole package name. This way, one can easily see, out of which components an entity consists of. It’s still not a 100% finished yet (e.g. deleting components is missing), but I think you can get the idea where it’s going to!

Refactoring the Master – Part I

March 17th, 2010

It’s time for some Level Master 2000 news again! I’ve been busy the last few weeks: filling out forms, such that my thesis suggestion gets accepted, and also thinking about how to clean up the monolithic structure I had on the C++ side. Ok, it’s also there on the ActionScript side, but one after the other…
So now, instead of mainly one class, I got over ten, instead of one Qt-UI file, I got six. Now numbers don’t say much, I can only say, I tried to use some loose coupling per signals and slots, which Qt offers, and split the code into classes on a functional basis…this means e.g. a Entity Explorer class, a Property Browser class, and so on.
Speaking of the Entity Explorer, I also am currently redesigning this. I’ll post a comparison as soon as it’s finished!
Then, it’ll be time for the ActionScript side ;)

Shriveling Apple Shader

March 14th, 2010

For “Advanced Computer Graphics”, a colleague of mine and I had to do a little shader project with FX Composer and CGFX.

We decided to create a shriveling apple material, which you can modify the age of. We used image based lighting for some nice diffuse and specular light, for the apple at a young age, reflections, and when getting older, some bump maps plus occlusion mapping. I ZBrushed the apple to get some nice maps, and so that I don’t have to paint them by hand.  We also wanted to add some vertex displacement per vertex textures, but we somehow didn’t get them to work…

Anyway, here’s the result:

Shriveling apple shader - part 1

Shriveling apple shader - part 1

Shriveling apple shader - part 2

Shriveling apple shader - part 2

Shriveling apple shader - part 3

Shriveling apple shader - part 3