Quarry Makes Games

All day, every other day

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Cadet fireteam go on a road trip, to hunt the terries down

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SPEC-LIST

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What happens when your exporter doesn’t output correct normals

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I was reading Doom’s code yesterday and looked into some of the rendering code. The horizontal plane drawing code is so easy, it’s not even funny!

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Well, this doesn't look like much but it’s actually something a bit more that pretty colours.

I have been working on finding a way to display a custom pixel buffer on screen with JavaScript and HTML5 for a while. Uploading pixels directly to a canvas ImageData works fine, but the problem is that if you want to scale it up without sacrificing nearest neighbour scaling (or using experimental CSS for “imageSmoothing”) you will have to do that manually as well.

After a certain point that approach becomes unsustainable and starts slowing down visibly.

Instead what I did was setting up a WebGL context, adding a real-resolution framebuffer and then scaling it up (same method used in Starshock to get a more “retro” look). After that, I created a texture and a Uint8Buffer that I filled with the colours I wanted. Apparently writing to that buffer and then streaming it to the texture with glTexSubImage2D works at 60 FPS and gives me exactly the results I wanted!

Update - I tried to see if it was smooth at larger resolutions as well, and it worked 60 FPS at 640 × 400 scaled upwards to 1280 × 800. Cool!

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That is some sick ass pixel art. Very nice.

Thanks, it’s all by Stefan "Coja" Bogdanović. Check him out!

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I thought of trying to “multisample” the graphics to achieve a smoothed out view and scale it back up to get it pixellated, but things ended up being too smooth and blurry for my tastes.

These are screenshots from the testbed. The top one is the new test and the bottom one is how it looks right now.

I really think that the crispy look is significantly better; but the new method can be experimented upon (on a different context that is, Starshock is going to keep on using the bottom one).

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More on LWJGL 3

I was just playing and realised that I hadn't set the window icon after transitioning to LWJGL 3.

Guess what; GLFW doesn't have real time window icon changing.

Okay then.

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Hooray..? for LWJGL 3

I've been working on transitioning the Starshock code to LWJGL 3 (from 2.9) for the past few weeks now and the thing is that I'm not sure if the direction they took with it is better than the 2 series.

It ended up becoming very, very low level compared to what LWJGL 2 was and now it ended up becoming nothing more than a library bind. Even the removal of the Input class shows what they are going for: You are on your own on doing what you want to.

This allows an higher extent of freedom for the developer but if I wanted things to get this low level I could use GLFW, OpenGL and OpenAL with C.

Why should I use LWJGL (and therefore Java) if all it provides is the same as the native libraries?

Obviously a lot of effort went into creating LWJGL 3, but is it really worth all the effort for developers to convert to without any significant impact on either the developer or the end user?

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Status quo

I'm not dead, people who have me on Steam are probably aware of that.

Starshock, with the lack of updates, seems dead. It sort of is though and I won't lie.

I've been busy with school, it's my last year and while I expected things to move on smoothly they failed to do so. Surrounded by assignments I need to finish to get my diploma, I manage to piece together bits and pieces but it's not easy.

Good news is that I've been accepted into a university in Netherlands, and passed the first stage on another one. Going to be taking an exam for the other one and hopefully pass that as it's my number one choice.

Let's hope that things work out dandy for me, so that they can work out dandy for Starshock.

Have a merry 2015, see you on Steam, Desura, Humble Bundle, and ---!