Week Two / Day One

So, this weekend didn't go exactly as planned. Home life took precedence and programming hit the back burner for over 72 hours unfortunately. But, we trek on. Today wasn't a very eventful day. I continued working through the book examples, adding surface rendering to the model viewer and even moving onto lighting and textures. The lighting is very simple, at least for what I'll need it for, but I'm not entirely comfortable with textures yet. The examples I've worked through haven't clearly shown how a simple texture is patterned onto a parametric surface without any clipping. I'm sure like most things I'll get to an "ah ha!" after staring at the code some more.

I also played around with my "testbed" app a bit. The testbed is where I implemented the accelerometer control, and I've now started to work on touch implementation a bit more. The coordinate planes of openGL and touch screen on the iPhone are not scaled the same, and so far my work of mapping the two has been a little screwy, but with a bit more tweaking it should be fine. I think I'm going to continue implementing technologies in the testbed, just to work out the kinks, so when the time comes for true implementation I'll have the hard parts figured out.

I really need to start considering overall engine design, but before that I need to nail down exactly how the game is going to work. After really considering the implementation of some of my original ideas I think I would be biting off more than I can chew, which I've only done once before. I'd rather that not happen again, at least if I can avoid it. I would really like to have a basic tech demo of the controls working by the end of the week, as well as a full design layout of the engine. I think I can do that.