Hectic week with my part time job, didnt have any time to work on the engine but tonnes of time to rethink things. Ive come up with a file system Im calling MARS (Mesh, Animation, Rig, and Skeleton files) that all work together to create a 3D textured, animated model on the iPhone. I think Ive fleshed everything out on paper, I just need to get to work and actually invent the filetype.

First things first, gotta load up Maya and see if I can remember back to my MEL scripting years in college. Shouldnt be too hard, Ill cover the Mesh filetype first. Pretty simple, just need to get Maya to export all of the selected models into my own format. Goodfella's is on AMC, that'll help.

Rewrote the .obj loader to be recursive. Every time a new "faces" string is read in from the file - signifying a new mesh - a new AEMesh3D is allocated and is sent the same file to load into it's memory, with the addition of a skip parameter that causes it to skip whatever mesh' were before it in the file. Seems to be working fine except Im still having some problems with pointers losing their reference. Im close though.

Scrapping the NSMutableArray approach, they come with too much overhead anyways. All of my vertexdata is currently being stored in std::vector arrays, if I can tell OGLES to only render specific portions of each vector array Ill be able to render multiple objects from a single vector eliminating the need for the NSMAs altogether. Back to the drawing boards to see if this can work.

engine progress

Things are starting out pretty slow. Beer in hand and The Social Network on tv, Im starting to flesh out a basic OGLES engine for the iPhone. Problems so far? Well all was well after writing a .obj loader last night to render simple models, but after a rewrite this morning to incorperate multi-object .obj files things have come to a hault. Seems to be a problem with memory pointers being deallocated inside of a method call that Im later referencing in my main program loop. Going to need to rethink this.