What I've Been Up To

So, I realize I've been quiet for a while now. It actually isn't because I've taken a break; it's because I'm working on something record-breaker big.

SDL is a great tool, which I love; and it's also an old tool which dates back maybe twenty two years—twenty years, since version 1.0. However, it's designed with a few things in mind. Programs using it should be on a flexible underlying API, they should be portable to multiple platforms (from cell phones to game consoles), and they should handle basic gaming needs in a standardized way. That makes it a good tool.

Unfortunately, it's also an intrinsically limited tool, especially for people like me who may eventually want to have UV noise and curved surfaces in their game. My imagination and persistence has outrun SDL2. The next tool that maintains the above constrictions, while opening up more possibilities at the cost of finer management, is GLSL, specifically that which came about for OpenGL 3.0+.

I'm porting the whole game to use GLSL instead. This has had a laundry list of fixes attach to it, which I'm happily almost at the end of. This includes an inverted coordinate system (SDL has the origin at the top-left of the screen with Y facing downward, which is an artifact of how old CRT monitors used to work; while OpenGL/Vuklan/GLSL has always leaned toward mathematically traditional origin at the lower left corner, which honestly I prefer), new forms of texture management, a programmable graphics pipeline, and most of all, the treatment of the graphics card/chip/hardware like it's a server. It will be much less resource-costly to run the game on a machine, on the bright side, and I'll be able to introduce all kinds of neat graphical effects.

I only have a few items left before the presentation has caught up with the SDL2 version. The next update will likely have something funky and fun going on in the background, and you can all see how I've been spending the past few weeks. In all honesty there are few languages I love quite as much as I do GLSL, and this is most certainly going to be worth the wait.

So, in case anyone's wondering, I've only scratched the surface of my plans for this game and you will hopefully start seeing new features added again soon.