(Title is sort of a spoiler for the content of this post) So I spent about an hour today debugging why a particular user interface element was generating OpenGL errors when I tried to draw it. It was this:
Another technical post today, since I’ve been banging away at revamping a problematic piece of VectorStorm’s API. In VectorStorm, here’s how one would normally create renderable text, assuming that you have a pointer to a vsFont in a variable called ‘font’: [code language=”cpp”] AddFragment( font->CreateString_Fragment( FontContext_2D, "My String", 30.0, Justification_Center, vsBox2D::CenteredBox( vsVector2D(100.f, 50.f) ), vsColor(1.0f,1.0f,1.0f,1.0f)…
I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time working on font rendering. Particularly considering that VectorStorm has supported font rendering for rather a long time now; it’s only been recently that I’ve really spent a lot of time making it exactly right. Drawing text is tricky for a number of reasons. For one thing, font…
I’ve taken a little time off from working on MMORPG Tycoon 2 over the past few days, and have been playing with an Oculus Rift VR headset dev kit, adding native support for it to the VectorStorm engine. It’s not in the VectorStorm trunk yet, but I’ve put it into a special “rift” branch which…
There are a lot of different ways to create shadows in video games. When I entered the game industry fifteen years ago, there were two standard ways to draw shadows: blob shadows and stencil shadows. (There was a third option as well: light maps, as popularised by Quake 2. But I’m not going to cover…