Development On Hold

Throughout the course of development for Collapse, I had been relying on OpenGL's age-old immediate mode for rendering. This proved to be a serious hindrance as I kept adding more advanced features such as lighting and shadows. My previous post about shadows works extremely well when shadows are limited to a single light. Clearly this is unacceptable, and the various techniques I tried to get it functioning with many lights either proved to be much too slow in immediate mode, or would require a serious amount of restructuring of the rendering system.

So, I put everything on hold temporarily and decided to learn modern OpenGL. I found a superb series of tutorials through StumbleUpon, and have been following them to gain a good base in the modern features of OpenGL, such as vertex array objects, matrices, and indexed geometry.

This task has sparked the development of a 2D engine, which I have dubbed IronClad. I've made a lot of progress in the past few weeks, implementing a VAO wrapper, support for a custom mesh file format, indexed geometry, shaders, and other nice features. I have also made a switch from SDL to GLFW for window management, and abandoned SDL_ttf in favor of FTGL. The reason for this is that the latest stable version of SDL only supports OpenGL contexts using versions <= 2.1, and I need more than that. The latest development build, SDL 2.0, supports the versions I need, but I'd most likely need a serious refactoring of my SDL code base to support it, so I decided to just make the switch to something OpenGL-specific.



Todo List (as of 11.14.2012):

• Vertex array/buffer object wrapper

• Indexed geometry

• Meshes

• Vertex and fragment shaders

• Projection matrices

• High-level scene manager

• Instanced geometry

• Geometry shaders

• Keyboard and mouse events through GLFW

• Transformation matrices for the instanced geometry

• Lighting

• Post-processing effects

• Shadows

• Sprite wrapper

• OpenGL framebuffer object wrapper