It has been a few months since the last Chunky posts on this blog, and since I have referred people interested in the development process to this blog I thought it was time to give an update on the current status of Chunky.
Some of you may already be aware that I am a PhD student. This is in practice a more-than-full-time occupation. I work on Chunky mostly during my summer vacation, and a bit during Christmas. I can’t let Chunky interfere with my work, and that is the main reason that development has been on a hiatus now since summer.
With that in mind, I have some short-term goals for Chunky that I hope I can reach when I have time to tinker with Chunky again. First, entity rendering should be added in a snapshot release. There is some partial entity support currently that I have in my development branch. The rendering pipeline and scene graph is in need of some significant refactoring in order to implement entities in a nicer way, so it might require a lot of work.
During the summer I worked on some improvements for sky rendering, but there is more that can be done in that area. I would like to improve the fog/atmosphere effects. This also ties in to the rendering pipeline refactoring. The new 3D cloud feature was hampered by a really bad rendering pipeline architecture.
In the distant future I would like to add an entity posing tool and a material editor. These are large components that would take a lot of work to design and implement but I think they would be really great additions to Chunky.
Of course, the often-requested GPU rendering support would also be fun to continue work on.
I don’t know when I can start working on the entity support again. My work is taking up much of my “free time” currently. I might be able to code some on Chunky around Christmas, hopefully!
I really love chunky and would like to thank you for your awesome work and all the effort you put in it! Keep up that great tool! :-)
Thank you, leMaik! It is always nice to get supportive comments like this!