Image unrelated. One of my pet peeves is games which need to quit and restart when some apparently trivial setting is changed. So when the original MMORPG Tycoon was released, I made an extra effort to make sure that you could change the game’s resolution while the game was running. It worked, but it was…
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…
Last time I talked about the history of the video game industry; how we got from coin-operated games to home consoles, and from open format consoles to proprietary ones, and how — and why — console makers keep control over the speed at which games are released on their consoles. We also talked about how…
The VectorStorm version 2 project has reached a milestone today: the “glow” shader has been reimplemented to work with it. In the original VectorStorm library, this “bloom” effect was implemented using about 200 lines of raw OpenGL code. It was ugly code, it was difficult to follow, it was difficult to maintain. In the new…