Death by Disco

It’s obvious that OpenGL and legacy rendering hardware were designed for just that… rendering, rather than gaming. Gaming functionality was hastily duct taped to the infrastructure via abominations like shaders. I’m working with a few shaders right now to circumvent some of GL’s more glaring deficiencies. It’s truly unfair to attribute all that to GL as it’s a problem with the infrastructure rather than the APIs that tie into it.

The more I deal with this shit the more I pity professional 3D programmers. This crap is really uncalled for at best, if not outright insulting.

Ah, this little trip into 3D is hellish indeed. The complex becomes simple just as the simple becomes complex. It’s maddening, really. Blending, scaling, rotating: painless and fast. Animating and modifying: slow and obtuse. I have to retrain my brain to think in terms of what OpenGL can do. No, no… we don’t get to draw circles any more, just a shitload of really short connected lines. I must say it’s really sucking all the fun out of the experience. At least I can comfort myself with the notion of being productive. My desk is clean, my whiteboard is full of ideas, and the house is devoid of anything that might distract me. My brain, frothy with dangerous thoughts, teeters on the brink of insanity as I chant some lost sutra at the altar of OpenGL.

The pixel gods are gonna beat my ass for this one.

I’m still working with OpenGL and still not loving it. The documentation, while abundant, is poorly designed and obviously suffers from the typical technical documentation malady of our times… meaning that it was written for someone who is already an OpenGL expert.

I find it amusing that ten years later and with numerous hardware and API iterations  behind me as a programmer I’m still running into the exact damn problem I always had — memory transfers. In software 2D reading and writing to video memory was so slow you wanted to make sure you double buffered and did a single dump to the video memory when the frame was fully drawn. In OpenGL you can get some hellish speed as long as you don’t touch the texture memory; hence people have to figure ways around that rather than being able to easily create dynamic textures and load them into the card as needed. It’s quite sad, actually. Every time I turn around I’m being reminded that programming today is just as shitty as it was yesterday, only we’ve shifted the annoyances from a purely technical category to one of compatibility. Same problems, different names.

I’m rather ill right now, so I’m sweating buckets while attempting to corral my kooky lines of thought just long enough to produce a few coherent paragraphs.

I have ascertained a few nuggets of wisdom over the past week, and as a public service I’d like to take a moment to share them with you in the hope that you will not tread the dark, damnable path that is slowly nibbling away at what little soul I have left. *Cough*

1. OpenGL is not meant for stupid people; verily I say unto thee it is meant for the the clinically insane.

2. PFNWGLGETPIXELFORMATATTRIBFVARBPROC  is the mark of the beast. Either that or a lost fragment from some unpublished Lovecraft manuscript.

3. When animating something as primitive as a texture becomes a major chore you know you have problems.

4. Hungarian notation is what you use when your crack-addled brain is no longer capable of realizing that other people might need to read your shitpile; pardon me… your code.

5. I will never, ever, apologize for number four.

Jack Dark, always a font of practical game design ideas, nailed me with the club of obvious shit +5 and suggested I rewrite my code a little to allow for liquids to be raised/lowered. Oddly, I had never even thought to do that — so focused I was on keeping the project as brutally simple as possible. The game itself is a little Strider, a little Prince of Persia, a little Liero/Shinobi, so movement is going to be extremely unrestricted as you approach the end of the game. The emphasis early on will be on combat, but as you start regaining your abilities you’ll have so much mobility that the environment itself will have to be called into play to keep your rampant progress in check.

Having control over the various liquids is going to be a valuable design tool in an already decent sized kit. There’s nothing like a river of acid creeping skyward to keep your progress focused that-a-way (points at ceiling). This also opens the possibility of having switch-type puzzles where you raise and/or lower liquids to create new passages or just plain kill enemies.

I’m having a wretched time getting back into the swing of things. Having finally recovered from the god awful malady that has essentially crippled me for the last four years I’m now faced with the prospect of recapturing my former creative muse. While I’m sure she’s still comfortably hiding in the hall closet consuming mass quantities of Cheetos while sampling some tastefully selected volumes of transsexual midget goat pr0n, I can’t really bring myself to actually open the door.

The voices in my head insist that I resume my mission to subjugate the entire galaxy with the almighty “Pixel Voodoo”, but alas… I’m tired. Imagine that. You spend the better portion of four years suffering and you actually want to spend a few minutes smelling the flowers? What a novel concept!

I’m fixing to unleash some truly hellacious shit on the world — but as usual you have to wait a little bit longer. I have to stop and catch my breath, oddly enough.