Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

This is a result of me learning bump shaders with also implemented reflection and refraction (just from cube skybox).
There wasn’t really a goal here, just to learn and show what could be achieved with my GPU (ATI Radeon 9800 I think) at the time.

📷Gallery

Link to more screenshots.

🔍Implementation

My code was using WinAPI for window creation and messages. Then Direct3D9 calls for rendering and HLSL 2.0 for vertex and pixel shaders. Also D3DX for anything else like 3D matrix and vector operations, compiling shaders, and loading 3D models (meshes) from X files. Lastly a sprite font, for screen texts (with parameters to adjust by keys) using my bitmap fonts.

To get mouse and keyboard events I was using DirectInput. I made a camera system to move around the scene, rotate and zoom. There was also 1 point light here.
I wrote a Timer (based on precise QueryPerformanceCounter) for checking intervals and computing current frame rate (Fps).

I think I made most of the basic models. I would use Blender for this now. The skull model and all textures were gathered from other demos and games.

⏳Conclusions

Professional made textures made the demos look quite good, already with simple 3D objects.
But those were just demos. In a bad looking, low level written code.

I continued using just C++ and Direct3D9 for a while in next project’s forks with terrain and water. And after that moved to using OGRE 3D engine.
All that was too tied to DirectX and would need major rewrites every time I wanted to use new DirectX interface. Another good reason for using an engine, it can have different rendering systems also OpenGL based.

Still, this experience was good learning for future, as I was developing shaders in Stunt Rally too, years later.