On Optimisations

There’s an old maxim amongst programmers, that premature optimisation is the root of all evil.  Or to put that in a less glib way, it’s generally a bad idea to perform optimisations before your program is completed, and it’s always a bad idea to perform optimisations if you have no way to check your performance…

Sigh

After all that time fixing and re-fixing VectorStorm’s 3D engine stuff during the development of Lord, I just found yet another whopper of a bug in VectorStorm’s 3D projection matrix (the projection matrix is basically used to ‘flatten’ 3D objects into a 2D plane so that they can be drawn to the screen) .  This…

Tinkering Under the Hood

Apologies; the following post is kind of technical.  Those who are uninterested in this sort of fiddly technical stuff can safely ignore this post;  it contains nothing at all relevant to game design.  :) A bunch of work under the hood of the VectorStorm engine, the past few days.  It’s mostly invisible from game code,…

Lighting in VectorStorm

I promise;  last post about lighting support! Here we have fully working lighting support.  We have a shiny sphere, and a more matte (though still lit) cube.  The bright white spots represent lights in the scene.. though in this screenshot, they’re not colored the same as the light they’re emitting.  They’re just for debugging that…

The Antepenultimate Lighting Post

I really do like to use $5 vocabulary words, sometimes. Anyhow, this is just a quick note that I’ve got lights into VectorStorm.  There might be a few minor API changes to them from here out, but they’re now basically functional.  Currently supported are ambient, directional, and point light sources.. which should be all I…