pelado

Max never ceases to amaze me. and frustrate me, but then i can only blame myself for that, can’t I?

new version… new features. and there’s plenty of them. in fact, i suspect a huge amount of effort has gone into this upgrade that we don’t even see, what with it now being platform independent and all. pity that hadn’t happened when the programme was opened up to windows, i suppose. but that’s the past, let’s look to the future.

looking through some of the jitter objects today and i came across something called jit.gl.asyncread (snappy name). its a new jitter object but not mentioned anywhere that i can see. there’s the help file of course, but i mean, if you don’t look for it you won’t find it. it just slipped into the pack quietly and unheralded. what does it do you might ask? go and check out the help file – its all there. or is it? its a pretty patch with some slab feedback and there in the corner is our new friend with a set up to record your scene in real time – asynchronously “(i.e. fast)”.

so i wondered what else is new? quickly browsing i came across jit.gl.cubemap. yeah we can now do cubemapping for our textures. it seems to work well, too. again its something that’s just happened, it’s simply appeared without mention. i think there might be a few more jitter objects too, lurking in the pack, the number of files in my externals folder increased by four, but hey, i don’t want to spoil the fun, they’ll turn up oneday.

cubemapping reminds me of the days I spent trying to get it to work before the cubemape object. i was using gl.sketch and trying to work out how to do it using gl commands, never got it to work of course. whilst on the subject, i did literally spend days trying to do some shadow mapping. i managed to get some shadows but they always looked like they were cast from different objects to those that i was drawing! it was almost there but never quite right.

thats all in the past again, i’m supposed to be looking to the future. but before i do… i was checking out the documentation and am pleased to see that all the attributes and messages to gl objects appear to be updated and with at least some explanation of what they do. for example, compare_func and compare_mode get a mention for gl.texture, but of course they’re for shadow mapping! why didn’t i ever think of that? maybe shadows are now possible to get right. we’ll have to wait and see for someone to try it and pose questions to the forum, or should I try it all again?

not sure that all the ‘messages to jitter’ get an overhaul though, where’s all the rtt, fbo pbo stuff? not sure if i’ve quite got the hang of that yet to be honest and maybe my graphics card doesn’t support some things?

anyway, the future…. do i sound disillusioned? don’t mean to. i have got this feeling that there’s still lots to be discovered, under the hood, as they say. guess its more late nights and saw eyes.