Some Thoughts on Bunnyhill Interface Design

I’ve gone through my first three weeks at DigiPen, and I finally have some time to cuddle with FlashDevelop once again.

I’ve decided to rewrite Bunnyhill from scratch. It’s been months since my last revision; lots of updates have been added to the latest Flash Player 11, and I’ve got some new ideas. So I think reworking Bunnyhill all over would be the best and fastest approach.

I’m keeping the scene graph structure, and I aim to simplify the initialization and set-up of a Bunnyhill canvas:

var canvas:Canvas =
	new Canvas
	(
		stage,
		antiAliasLevel,
		useDepthAndStencilBuffers
	);

That’s it. The code above takes care of initializing the Context3D initialization and setup; it also takes care of stage resize handling.

In addition to working with scene graph, I’ve decided to expose to users direct access to the graphics object.

var graphics:IGraphics = canvas.graphics;

In this way, users can have more low-level graphics control. Here’s the current IGraphics interface design. I might add more stuff to it later. It essentially groups together the fundamental operations users need to work with graphics. I’ve split some original option parameters in some Context3D methods into multiple methods, in order to make the interface more user-friendly.


public interface IGraphics 
{
	function get vertexShader():IVertexShader;
	function set vertexShader(value:IVertexShader):void;
	
	function get fragmentShader():IFragmentShader;
	function set fragmentShader(value:IFragmentShader):void;
	
	function createVertexBuffer():VertexBuffer;
	function createIndexBuffer():IndexBuffer;
	
	function createTexture(width:uint, height:uint):Texture;
	function createRenderBuffer
	(
		width:uint, 
		height:uint
	):RenderBuffer;
	
	function setVertexBufferAt
	(
		index:uint, 
		vertexBuffer:VertexBuffer, 
		format:String
	):void;
	
	function setVertexShaderConstant
	(
		startIndex:uint, 
		data:Vector.<Number>
	):void;
	
	function setFragmentShaderConstant
	(
		startIndex:uint, 
		data:Vector.<Number>
	):void;
	
	function setTextureAt
	(
		index:uint, 
		texture:Texture
	):void;
	
	function drawTriangles
	(
		indexBuffer:IndexBuffer, 
		startIndex:uint = 0, 
		count:uint = 0
	):void;
}

Now for the scene graph. There’s a root node on the canvas object to which users can assign a reference to the root node of a scene graph. The following scene graph is to draw two sprite sheets attached to a group node, which is the root node of the scene graph.

canvas.root = 
	new Group
	(
		mySpriteSheet1, 
		mySpriteSheet2
	);

That’s the basic idea. There are more special nodes I’m currently designing, including blend mode nodes, render buffer nodes, transform nodes, etc.

I hope I won’t get too busy with school work before finishing Bunnyhill.

About Allen Chou

Physics / Graphics / Procedural Animation / Visuals
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