Both are made by the same people, have the same motivations, are made in the same language. Experiencing the former is a good experience. However, experiencing the latter is a whole other dimension of interesting. OpenGL is fun to learn, and Portal is fun to play. But I’ve decided to start using Vulkan, and god damn, there’s a lot. You have to enumerate through and interface with devices, you have to create debug messengers, validation layers, buffers, arrays, etc.. Portal 2 gave me that same feeling. (Spoilers for Portal 2): [Falling down into Test Shaft 09 was the moment I realized this game is a lot deeper than I thought. You have to manage repulsion and propulsion gels, tractor beams, faith plates, lasers, and more.] Once you use OpenGL/play Portal, you start to get good at it and can crank out a playthrough/project in a few hours. With Vulkan/Portal 2, it takes a hell of a lot more dedication, but by god its worth it.
I was watching an old Game Theory video, and a forum post that was cited caught me by surprise:
That looks a lot like your icon! Could it be you??
Wow, talk about a blast from the past! Yep, that's me, many years ago. I haven't posted on that forum in years, but it used to be one of my main internet hangout spots. Man, I miss video game forums. And I sometimes do a bit of 3D graphics development as a hobby, so that's why I was able to write all that nonsense back then. Fun fact: I also literally own a Utah teapot, the original teapot that the famous 3D model was modelled after, and yesterday I wore an OpenGL T-shirt to work.
(I didn't have this particular avatar yet when I originally wrote that post, at least I think, but that forum was the first place where I used it.)
As a general note, please do not use my forum posts from 2006 as references for anything, unless I link to a more useful source (like here). I was very stupid at the time, even more so than I am today.
The video is very interesting. The presentation style is not quite my personal jam, but it is a fascinating topic and it's nice to see what else they were able to dig up.
Was looking around the village but couldn’t see anyone around! 👀 Wondering what happened!? 🤔 And suddenly noticed everyone went to buy grain! Perhaps there is a famine on the way!! 😅
Taken to the logical conclusion: Seems my first NPC AI test sucks 🙈
well, unfortunately, one of their features is requiring an OpenGL that only exists in first world PCs, pricing out most of the world, which was already massively underrepresented in the Minecraft community.
The visible MC community was already 99,999% US and UK, now they'll be the only ones there.
Some updates for the little physics sim I call boop.
I've been curious how far I can push using solid BSP trees to do collision detection. In order to do this the models had to be redesigned so the engine can understand the volume those models occupy. I've manage to speed things up enough to get some more detailed models working too!
A modern game engine typically uses basic colliders like boxes and spheres, which I'll probably need to add eventually. But I just find this way really fascinating. I also figure I can switch to hidden and simplified physics models to speed things up without changing much.
I also tweaked the shaders a bit so the lighting looks a tiny bit nicer. The lighting is less yellow, and the shadows are softer. Using the code I added for the cube mapped reflections on the windows, I was also able to add a skybox too.
You can see a hole in the front of the dumpster, this is because my rendering pipeline doesn't have a path for transparent textures. The shadows are also jagged due to the low resolution shadow map and distance to the light source. Something I'll need to work on.