i went down a similar path to learn opengl. I do like objs simple to load. I went with all triangles though. I had GL-ES in mind and those exotic geometry shapes arnt supported. Switching over to shaders isnt too bad either. You do need some code to load and compile the shaders, but the buffer and rendering is basically the same (little different api). My game was a space invaders shooter. Thanks for making this video.
Yeah I never got into shaders though I was always interested to one day try them out. My career really interfered with my hobby for about 20 years. It might be time to give it a try. 🙂
Thanks for the OpenGl basics. When video has started, i thought you will be using 2D OpenGL functions to recreate Zaxxon. Anyway, i think you can improve on Normalize function by using either some fast SQRT algorithm or SSE vectorized version, also for the cross Product.
I tried to use Northcad 3D to make polygon objects, bit tricky, but it produces a .plg file, identical to Blender's obj file. It can be imported into VGA.
I was thinking about making the old Sierra games 3D.. THe thing is.. they effectively already are. While the vector data on the primary graphics layer only have X and Y coordinates the vector layer on the secondary interaction screen also have Y data.
One problem with the vector data is that the polygons don't close. The edges were apparently drawn by hand and edges may terminate on neighbouring pixels and flood filled. This is fine in fixed resolution, but can be problematic in higher resolution.
@@billhart3814 well of cause. That is not quite the only problem. The Z cordinates have very low resolution so it have to be be interpolated. A solution to the non closing issue could be to gerate closing vectors. Still.. there will probobly be some hands on to trim the 3d
