Dev Night Diary

Significantly more success last night. I'm actually quite impressed with GLUT - it completely works as advertised. Not that I have much to right home about - but I do have two spinning triangles in 800 by 600 window and one triangle that will rotate on player input, namely the "a" and "d" keys.

The theory here is that while it's harder to do all this stuff without a net ... and by net I mean actual game engine ... I'll hopefully keep the scale so small that it won't really matter. Right now, you can write a decent iTunes visualizer by piping audio data into OpenGL animations. So technically the only systems I'm really missing are player control, collision and scoring. So unlike Untitled Tempest Clone, this won't require any client-server to bridge the audio data, it will just run off the live feed (and within iTunes).

So why didn't I do this before? Well, it's not trivial. You really get an appreciation for games like Asteroids when you realize that your code has no understanding of say .... direction. That's not a triangle with a proper top or bottom or anything - it's just a shape that OpenGL is being told to draw (and occasionally rotate). Which is end is up? And what's the proper coordinate to move "forward"?

Clearly, these questions are answerable ... it will just take a little more thought and research than simply spinning some shapes around.



tagged: game, gaming