Welcome back! It's been a while since my last update, but progress is still being made. Here's a brief overview of what's been going on since my last update:

1. I spent some time doing code cleanup. Mainly, the way that I manage shaders was becoming unwieldy and so I decided to invest a bit of time updating scripts and creating data files to make the process a little simpler. The current setup is still not ideal, but it makes managing shaders easier and I can always revisit it and make it better later.

2. I updated the game's background to use some free cubemap textures from online (http://www.humus.name). This provided a noticeable change from the solid color cubemaps in my previous post (see results above). Adding these new textures revealed that I had a bug in my D3D12 copy queue resource uploads. I went into bug fixing mode to track down the issue and eventually found and fixed it. The bug fix process also revealed an intermittent hang on shutdown within D3D12 and I corrected that issue as well.

3. Last, I updated the D3D11 backend to use the DirectX 11.1 large constant buffers feature. This change was mainly to allow the D3D11 and D3D12 backends to be a little more closer in how they manage uploading constant buffers and hopefully allow me slightly modify my underlying renderer interface.

That's pretty much what's been going on. Lots of behind the scenes technical work, but a few visual updates too.

P.S. Excuse the shadows on the side of the game board in the image above. I plan to revisit shadows in the future.