Hi there! The original plan was to publish a very exciting piece of information about a certain internal-use only development tool for Cool VES that I managed to finish developing two weeks ago, but something came up and I’ve been using my free time to develop a certain Windows application that doesn’t have anything to do with CoolBasic (although while doing it I probably obtained valuable experience that will help me developing some Cool Developer editor features in the future), but is related to my professional career instead. Don’t worry, though, as I’ll be sharing my time on various points of interest now, naturally CoolBasic being one of them. There’s just too few hours in a day for me to get everything done I’m up to. The introduction of the tool mentioned above is still on my TODO list, but meanwhile let’s take a look at something completely different.

This experiment I did last weekend has an indirect link to CoolBasic V3. Yes, V3 is currently intentionally frozen since CoolBasic Classic and Cool VES have priority over it, but nevertheless I decided to take some time to familiarize myself to the Irrlicht 3D engine. The aim for me was to just refresh my memory about the theoretics and gain simple practical knowledge on how to get a 3D scene up and running and how to put some content to it. I assembled a neat demo that doesn’t do much, but it does pilot some basic stuff like creating meshes, applying materials and transparency, reading input from keyboard and mouse (in the demo you can fly freely around the cube), and rendering TrueType text. Actually, there’s something else not visible in the screenshot, but that’s more advanced stuff related to a game engine concept I came up with just recently.

I plan to continue this experiment of mine, by trying to implement a realtime constructed terrain based on volumetric data which is, in my opinion, a very intriguing mechanic. Yes, it may seem like a sidetrack from the CoolBasic project, but from time to time, it’s good for your mental endurance to try out different things 🙂

The DevTeam is working on to reveal more information about the upcoming code editor, Cool Developer, in “nearish” future.