The Problem
OpenGL and other low-level rendering APIs are limited to rendering convex polygons. This causes a complications to arise when trying to render concave primitives. In my case, I wanted to be able to render arbitrary 2D "ground," and not succumb to manually breaking apart the polygon into OpenGL-compatible primitives. Thus the search for a triangulation algorithm arose. All I could find were algorithm names without accompanying implementations or explanations, and long mathematical abstracts on computational geometry. Any implementations I
did find seemed to be extremely over-engineered and over-complicated for easy comprehension and adaptation. I finally settled on writing my own implementation of the ear-clipping algorithm to facilitate triangulation.
What We Will Accomplish
 |
 |
| 139-vertex polygon |
Triangulated |
