Triangle strips were originally by chance were rendering correct for most cases
until collision detection was implemented. Incorrect assumptions about
specifying triangle strip winding order meant that on occasion the last triangle
in a polygon would not be rendered.
This has been amended by strictly ensuring that on rendering of polygon the
order is correct from the vertices that are passed in.
We need to generate interim vertex points during the collision detection loop
that includes rotation to check for collision. During collision detection,
vertex points are rotated and positioned in placed for checking.
We also re-create this vertex list in the renderer suggesting that we could
cache the list in the entity or look at coupling rendering and collision
detection.
Fundamental mismatch between rotation and offset of polygons. Polygons can be arbitrarily ordered in terms of vertices as long as they are in a CCW order.
However there should be no restriction on the starting vertex position.
Since this is the case, the entity offset for a polygon should offset from the
starting vertex to the perceived "entity origin". This entity origin is where
collision detection, rotation and movement is based off.
Occasionally with the right orientation, degenerate triangles will appear as
they are no longer zero-area triangles which OGL can cull during rendering. The
issue comes from having to manually ensure each primitive in the rendering
pipeline sent to the render groups were correctly marked with degenerate
vertexes.
Instead, we can now just pass the vertex points straight through, using
a begin() and end() structure which will append the start and ending degenerate
vertexes for us.
Asteroids move and are a part of the entity sytem. Added some debug markers for
memory usage and fixed a bug in logic causing degenerate triangles to show up
depending on the angle of approach towards the origin.
Switch to something of smaller scope in aim to be able to finish a project from
start to finish. Also allow refreshed eyes to review the existing API and see
what can be improved on after taking a short break from the project.
No longer repeatedly invoke malloc for retrieving memory. Some operations still
leak memory (notably audio streaming). We introduce notion of Transient and
Permanent storage. Transient memory is used for data in memory that is
temporarily allocated (i.e. graphics for that frame's output), and permanent as
more like game state storage.
We now give out pointers from a pre-allocated block of memory, so we have no
allocation cost and benefits of reduced memory leaks. The transient block gets
reset every frame. Any memory allocated within is cleared at no cost simply by
rearranging the base pointer of the memory block.
Premultiply transformation matrix onto vertices before sending onto GPU to
preserve transformation properties of entities before being batched into
a general group. This removes the model matrix from the shader pipeline- instead
in rendering code we deal in world space (which works out to be more intuitive).
Only in the last step in GLSL we convert back to normalised coordinates.
Incorrect assumption that strings only needed degenerate vertexes at the start
and end of each string instead of characters causing render "wings" between
separate strings.
Fix render-group not switching to next group if current group is full.
Degenerate triangles allows a single triangle strip call to be called on
multiple independent triangles without "connecting" strips inbetween the
triangles.
Render all entities with the same texture in one call. Currently only
implemented for humanoid entities. Since we are rendering using triangle strips,
between entities there is invalid rastered data between entities. Using
degenerate triangles this may be mitigated, by indicating to OGL which triangles
it can skip in the rendering process.
Attempting to add child weapon data to an entity has revealed the need for an
entity origin to which children start transformations from. Worth exploring
scene graphs in the future.
Main change is switching the camera to use a rectangle. There is no rect
change in renderer for grouping size and position together. Due to
noticing the use case of rendering- where it's convenient to be able to
offset the rectangle from the position value when passed into the
function explicitly without having to re-create offset Rectangle structs
to pass in.
Until engine architecture can clearly be separated from the game, i.e.
notion of entity storage belonging to game and concept of entity belonging
to engine, worlds/scenes belonging to game or engine- the project will
only refer to Dengine.
Notion of pivot point now for rotating, i.e. the anchor point at which
rotations are applied. Rotating the reticule is done by using inverse
trigonometry, namely atan2f.
Mobs battle in real-time with the hero when in range. Start encapsulating
logic into entityStateSwitch() to organise entity properties changing
between different states.
Introduce basic concept of memory management in MemoryArena. Begin passing
around a memory object to track memory usage and eventually delegate
memory allocations through. Remove the old memory tracker in the debug
object and incorporate into engine primarily.
Add a debug console for logging information and events to the screen in
a console-like fashion. Debug is now initialised after the game, this is
so that you can pass the game's memory arena and font file to the debug
services. Debug services now properly initialise debug element positions
from this information and not through the update routine.
Mixing and matching V2 int and float types in the code creates too much
necessary work when an integer implementation has to interact with float
implementation. Let V2i create the cast for us and use floats for all
vector operations since they are mostly mathematic.
Begin to add notion of a hitbox entity size and the rendering size.
Dynamic entities such as players will have animations that should exceed
the size of the actual player, we should be able to render it at the
desired size even if larger than the actual size.
Collision still occurs on the entity size (i.e. hitbox). Remove the notion
of updating animation in the renderer, we update in WorldTraveller,
removing any concept of passing a "deltatime" to the renderer. The
renderer's purpose is to draw not parse animation logic.
