RE: Designing a renderer

> Thanx for your honest words. To clear things up let me tell 
> you what I do:

Sure, like I said, I assumed you were a hobbist, but wasn't sure.

> I work at a university and we research about emotions in 
> motion and my task
> is to write some kind of API that could be used in a game 
> environment. 

What you really want to do is write it totally renderer neutral. Assuming
you are talking about emotions in the skeleton animation sense, then make
your API use hooks into the 'game' allowing your matrices to be set and
queried.

One thing you might want to look into is Granny by
http://www.radgametools.com/ (I haven't actually seen the sdk though)

> The
> reason I asked was to get an idea how games are implemented 
> by professionals
> and not hobbist.

Okie.

> So maybe we forget the question and maybe you allow me to ask 
> again but in a
> different way.
> What is a renderer? 

Well, to me (personally) a renderer is the low level part of the graphics
engine that handles the actual submission of the graphics
(faces/verts/materials etc) to the graphics card. A renderer might (but
doesn't always) include culling, animation etc. It's lower level than what I
assume you want to be working on.

What you want are hooks into your system to allow the glue code between your
API and the renderer to query the matrices.

> And how is it implemented in a common 
> way? 

I don't think there is a 'common' way.

> What classes
> and functions contains the render module normally? E.g: Is a 
> class that
> represents a TriMesh part of the renderer module?

Yes, typically mesh/vertex array/vertex buffer/shader/material are bits of
the renderer, sometimes animation/animation set/pvs are also, but often they
are written in a layer above the renderer.

> 
> Best regards
> 
> Dirk

________________________
Regards, Gareth Lewin
Programmer, Sudeki
http://www.xbox.com/Sudeki


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