Development Journal of a Raytracer

As finally the export and the import was working I changed the format today. I wrote some time ago that I intended to do that. It is necessary to support more complex objects I intend to use. In the editor the objects would be called "groups", but I want to have objects in the game program which have all the properties needed for rigid body animations. I might loose some efficiency by not being able to share parts, but I have some doubts if that would be worth having much more objects to manage.

For now the XML-DTD has been adapted to the new format and parts of the parser have also been changed. For the parser I mostly added a new type (not implemented yet) for the rigid parts and renamed some variables. I also moved some code between old functions and new ones. What is missing is the implementation of the new class and the functionality to turn the data into something Java3D can work with. Also I will have to move some code between the old classes and the new one to be written.

As soon as this is working I will have to add a class which contains (and controls) all the data of one file. Currently I create some Java3D-objects and attach them to a group and return that. This group is then attached to the scene graph. I basically will define a container for the group which has accessors to the rigid parts and especially their transformations.