I’ve been porting my old terrain system to my new code base, and
from OpenGL to D3D11. As of today it is rendering at more
or less visual parity with the OpenGL version. It still lacks any form
of culling and has no shadows, but overall a major upgrade from a few
days ago when it looked like a couple of broken triangles.

While porting it, one system I ditched was my old threaded job
system–which was used heavily during terrain generation.

Instead I’ve decided to use Intel’s thread building blocks. Initially I
was using Microsoft’s concurrency runtime, but a few problems compared to
TBB drove me away. One major annoyance is that MCRT won’t compile
in C++/cli(while TBB will); amusing considering C++/cli is
a MS product.

It took abit but eventually I had TBB performing on par with my
old job system, and TBB should be a win in the end since it is
much more flexible.

Files

One useful feature I added recently was a file monitoring system–
mostly intended to make development easier–it notes any files that
my program opens, and if and when any of them change while the program
is running it sends out a message so that any interested system can
reload the file.

So far just using this with lua files and shader files, but it is very nice
to be able to modify a shader, hit save, and have it immediately reflected
in the game.

To make this work generically for all D3D resources I had to add an
extra level of indirection, I did wrap it up in a way that just changing
a typedef will allow me to toggle between the two– though on a modern
PC it probably makes little to no difference.