Return of the Hack

Welladay… it turns out the Intel HD5000 ‘hack’ is no longer a hack!

After doing a lot of tweaks/fixes/adjustments to the Mac OSX build (which is now running exactly as the Windows build was – huzzah!) – I return to the happy green pastures of Windows 7 to find that 666 won’t even get past initialising OpenGL… and when I fixed that – Dom was rendering total gibberish on screen!

After saying ‘Yoiks!’ a lot (this is a censored version of what I actually said) – I’ve finally (after a few days of hair tearing) found the issue.

The issue, is that the vertex tangent array index on ATI and nVidia cards was never actually correct in the first place!

The shader response to ‘glGetVertexAttribLocation’ was returning -1 all the while, and had never actually ever returned the correct (expected) value of zero. It seems the ATI and nVidia OpenGL driver just ‘fixes’ this up. Somehow. Auto-magically.

But the Intel HD5000 one does not.

So – assigning the vertex tangent array index to ‘1’ is now the solution on all graphics cards (that I can test on). The HD5000 ‘bug’ has actually ended up with my fixing a long-standing, and totally hidden bug in my engine.

Who would have thought it, eh?

So – that’s been my week of Dom Dev. At least I can now move on and get back to the ‘AI’ Behaviours I was working on before Christmas 🙂

In other news, OCZ replaced the SSD without quibble with a brand new SSD – and I’ve decided to ‘migrate’ to Windows 8.1 despite my misgivings. I’ll prep up the old 64Gb SSD with Windows 7 for dev testing and as a “fall back” just in case 😉

Onward!