Tigre 0.94

08.03.2010

The Tiny Graphics Engine has been updated with this features:

• GlMaterial allows to disable depth buffer writting
  
• GlColor replaced with GlColor4F that supports advanced features
  
• bug fixing
  
• GlRenderPanel (unstable yet)
  
• GlParticleArray
  
• improved EGL setup
  

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OpenGl ES 2.0

07.03.2010

Currently, Tigre supports only OpenGl ES 1.x with a fixed rendering pipeline. Since there are some newer devices such as the Touch HD2 or the Omnia 2 that comes with OpenGl ES 2.0, I decided to support that api too. So what is new in OGLES 2.0? This new 3D api allows you to use shaders to replace fixed functionality from OpenGl ES 1.x. Shaders are used for advanced effects such as Per-Pixel-Lighting(bump maps, phong lighting,...) but also post processing effects(bloom, hdr,...) and much more!!! Some early prototypes worked already more or less, but it will take some time to get a stable release because nearly every line of code is affected by that. The next few updates will not deliver OpenGl ES 2.0 support, but it is under developement

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Windows Phone 7 + Tigre

07.03.2010

Maybe you've asked yourself as a developer if your software will run also under Windows Phone 7 Series. I can't tell you, but one is for sure: Tigre will be available for WP7 too and it will come with full OpenGl ES 2.0 support (this will allow you to use shaders for most realistc effects). Because there are many open questions about the upcoming os it's not yet clear in which form the engine will be ported (depends on what is allowed by Microsoft). So let's see what the new os brings to the developers!

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Tigre 0.88

16.02.2010

Tigre was updated to v0.88 and features now

• dithering
  
• geometry library has been extended with a cube and a tube object (more objects coming soon)
  
• improved texture loading: automatic downscaling and per-pixel operations
  
• the internal data management has been improved
  
• Vertex Buffer Objects: allows to store GlMeshData directly into the gpu memory(requires GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object). Currently the data of vbo's cannot be changed, this will be included in a upcoming release
  
• GlTextureRectangle: a new 2D object that can be used to draw textures directly and faster than with a GlMesh2D. Additionally, the texture can be cropped. GlTextureRectangle requires the GL_OES_draw_texture extension.
  
• GlPointSprite: enables simple particle effects by texturing points. Requires GL_OES_point_sprite.
  

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Game announcement

05.02.2010

Today, the development of the first Tigre based game has started! I can't tell you much about it right now, only 3 things:

• the game will feature 100% smooth 3d goodness
  
• the graphics will be very good and colorful
  
• gsensor will be used
  

As soon as possible I'll give more details and screenshots.

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Updates

02.02.2010

The Tigre binaries are updated now to 0.79 with some minor changes. There are also 3 new demo applications available for the Tigre Demo Suite that shows alpha blending, fog and a virtual trackball.

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Temo Suite Updated

29.01.2010

The Tigre Demo Suite has been updated with 4 new demos. The "Hierarchic Animation Demo" shows a robot that is animated by groups. "Frustum Culling" shows how to detect if a object is in the view frustum or not. The "Lighting" demo shows simple lighting and the "Texture Matrix" demo shows how to manipulate the the texture matrix. The source code of the demos is available too.

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new tool and format

26.01.2010

Tigre allows two basic mesh data structures: indicted and direct. A direct organized structure is very simple. The vertex points are stored as an array and always three vertices in series describes a triangle. An indices structure is more complex. The vertices does not need to be sorted because there's a new array of indices. Always three indices describes a triangle. This method is more efficient during rendering, but loading from obj files can be quite slow (obj files are a direct structure)! To avoid long loading times you can use the Tigre Mesh Format TMF. This format allows to preload the data as an indicted structure.

The Mesh Demo in the Demo Suite shows the difference between the two data structures.

The new tool "Geometry Analyzer" allows to analyse and convert obj and tmf files. You can find the Demo Suite and the Geometry Analyzer in the download section.

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A lot of new stuff

22.01.2010

Instead of providing all new demo applications as standalone package, I decided to release the "Tigre Demo Suite". This package contains currently 4 different samples, more will be added continuously. The source code for these samples is online too.

Since the last release of Tigre binaries there were a lot of design chances, so don't worry if the code from older versions will not work out of the box.

As usual the files are stored in the download section.

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More Performance

15.01.2010

The previous Tigre demos offered already a good performance, but there were no optimizations for now. The latest test builds features some optimizations for geometric objects. In some special cases there were performance improvements of up to 100%! The only problem is the long loading time for wavefront obj files. But don't worry, I've created a little file format that is very similar to the obj format. So you can convert any obj file to this new format (on the desktop or on the mobile!). The new binaries and some sample code will be available soon!

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