Dev Day Diary

I got some work in both Saturday and Sunday. Again, I have very little to show for it. On the Open GL side, I got stroke fonts (stroke fonts are 3D scaleable as opposed to the 2D non-scaleable) and display lists (an important performance structure) running - but neither out of my current example, just modified versions of existing tutorials. I wasn't having much luck with integration which means there's something I'm clearly not grokking.

Sunday was largely trying to get an empty plugin to be picked up by iTunes. I figure if I get that done and then get the plugin to display basically any Open GL drawing, I'll have most of the foundation work. Sadly Apple's Visualizer example isn't the best example in the world. For one thing, it relies on another library to perform all it's memory management. So if anything goes wrong with that library, it throws off the whole example. Naturally, the library wasn't compiling for me. Plus, it's a long rambling demo without much specific documentation. If Apple seriously wanted to people to jump in and code these things, a primer would be wise.

So by the end of the weekend, I had some compiled code I somewhat understand and a compiled plugin that iTunes doesn't like. I think its because I was working around the memory management code, though, and iTunes isn't being told specifically what it's looking at when the plugin registers. So next step would be: register the plugin and get it to create a triangle.

This would be why pre-packaged engines are so attractive...

I haven't actually figured out what kind of game I'll make with this - but there's likely to be either a Robotron or Galaga clone demo just to prove the concept.




tagged: game, gaming