Week Seven / Day Five

I was on babysitting duty this morning, and my girlfriend leaves for college tomorrow, so not too much got done today. What I did get done though was the bare-bones of the engine loading up and rendering in a Windows OpenGL window. What you see below in the Windows GL screen is the same as the iPhone screenshot, just without any textures and an expanded viewport.



The blue shapes (#336699 in hex, or close to that, which is my most commonly used color in design I do for anything) are the polygons which lay under the textures, and the white blocks are the shapes that make up each letter of the text textures. Doesn't look like much, but it's quite the leap forward. Once I get file i/o straightened out I'll be able to load levels I've already built, and save new ones, that being the point of all this. Once I have file i/o working I'll start the mouse and keyboard interaction, as well as the extensions that need to be made to the engine to allow realtime creation of planets and such.

One of the 'hitches' with the code right now is the fact that rendering speed is dependent solely on the host systems ability to update. This means the whole thing is built to run specifically on the iPhone, and runs way too quickly on my pc. While this isn't too big of a problem, as I'll be able to delay the play rendering to make it work, this is poor poor design. All of the rendering and updating should be fixed and finely controlled, not just adapted to its environment as I'm doing now. While given the nature of my game this won't cause too many headaches on the devices I plan to release on, it is something that seriously needs to be considered from the design standpoint for the next engine.

I really need to start writing this all down.