Triptych

The three camera controllers and input paths are working. Here is a composite shot of the a scene that I took with all three cameras.

• On the left, the scene with my build camera which you can use to spin the scene and move a 2D cursor to add and remove bricks.
  
• In the middle, a "minifigs-eye-view". This is a first person view from the minifigs perspective showing what he sees. You are free to walk around the world as a minifig.
  
• On the right my third person "adventure" controller where you can see your character and explore the environment. This out-of-body experience lets you control the minifig like a traditional game character.

I've bound F1, F2, F3 to switch between them while playing which is good enough for now.

There is still a little more work before a public build is ready. The new cameras, camera controllers and input controllers are all wired together using manual dependency injection and while the scene is still a directed acyclic graph I'm worried that it would be difficult to do in a clean factory so I think a code review is in order.

The build palette is pretty rudimentary, with only a half-dozen bricks in that I've been testing with but it should be trivial to include most of the basic bricks, plates, tiles etc... that I had in the prototype and the new LDR importer should mean adding custom bricks is reasonably quick and painless.
I need a mesh cooker - this has been on the backlog for a long time. I'm currently importing OBJ and LDR meshes on startup but a really quick mesh serializer would be much better. Now I'm doing small iterations, the import time is really starting to annoy me.

Other than that, there are a few misc tasks to address, including some visual glitches that are going to bother me if I don't take time out to address them, including the difference in shadow depth precision on nVidia and ATI hardware (yes. that's still broken) and adding more config options for the render quality.

Comments and questions about Pioneer, programming or game development welcome - I'm thinking of doing an Q&A blog post to answer a bunch in one go.

So until next time, keep building!