Phoenix Game Development

I have finally begun to implement texturing in the Phoenix Engine. I had initially planned to use procedural texturing, but after some research, I realised that this would not be a workable solution. I am instead implementing a standard texturing system, by loading the .MTL file (that is exported automatically from the modelling tool with […]

I also spent time this week working on the games world builder. I want to incorporate procedural content into the game, and so I need to come up with a system that can render .OBJ models according to an algorithm. I need players to be able to navigate around the world, selecting and interacting with […]

I spent some time thinking of some new ideas to increase efficiency in the engine. I found some ways that I could cull some geometry from the scene by using simple algorithms to determine which geometry is being rendered, and which isn’t. Since the game that I am currently using this engine to produce is […]

I have solved most of my performance issues for now. It has turned out that I was passing the data for my object file as a variable, for each object, in every render pass. This was obviously causing a huge performance problem. A very simple addition of an ampersand (“&”) to force the code to […]

I have noticed, after the new features that I have added to the project, that the framerate has become very slow. There are a number of possible explanations for this. The first one that springs to mind is the fact that I am using, for some of my rendering, the older GlBegin() and GlEnd() pairs. […]

I have successfully implemented click detection and object selection in the game engine. Originally, I used the “official” method of  first creating a mouse callback, and then using code to select the objects close to the position that the player clicked. I used glLoadName() to identify the world objects. This didn’t work well at all, […]

I have now implemented the ability for the player to cycle the text onscreen. Finalising the text rendering took a little more work than I thought, since I had to integrate it into my existing rendering code. I realised that the main reason for my issues was a slight confusion over the way OpenGL works. […]

I have finally finished implementing freetype fonts in this project. This was a long process, and much more complex than I thought. I found that a lot of the tutorials available online were written for older versions of OpenGL, and would not work correctly with the code that I was using. One of the problems […]