So I stayed up late last night getting the lighting working. Turns out I was doing my gluPerspective and gluLookat against my MODELVIEW instead of against my PROJECTION matrix. Here’s the result:

Now I think I’m going to try and get a bit more texture variety, windows, height variety, thinner walls, some torches, and some shadows. Didn’t get all this just now, but here’s an update:

Now I’m working on switching from dev under linux to dev under OS/X and XCode. The Linux dev has been tough because with VMWare Fusion I don’t get GL under linux, so the framerate is pretty bad. I had an old SSH -Y trick that tunneled the GL back out to OS/X, but that seems to be even slower than software rendering today. Maybe it’s just time I embraced XCode and tweaked the key bindings a bit to suit myself.

Having done that, and tweaked a few settings, it’s time to start loading up data from files instead of inlining all my level data, etc. I think I’m going to give JSON a whirl for this project, since it should make handling all this pretty straight-forward. It also is supported in just about every language, so I can use my python scripts for generating texture atlases and fonts and have them just spit out some JSON for my code to load up. I had also considered sqlite for this purpose, but I think in this case, a database isn’t quite the right fit.

I think sqlite is a good fit for when you need to store CSV type data, except you want it packed. It’s particularly useful if you’re going to be storing a larger amount of data. In this game, the largest data store will be the level itself, which I can’t imagine will be much larger than 200k or so. sqlite can handle huge amounts of data and it’s quite efficient for that, but it’s also a database so you have to access everything using queries, which can be cumbersome if they aren’t needed.

Using python to generate the atlas does give me an excuse to pop back into linux for a while though!

-Phil

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 28th, 2010 at 8:21 pm and is filed under dynamite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.