DFGame Summer Progress: More Graphics!

Time for my first summer post. I haven't talked about dfgame's improvements since my second three-week project a few months ago.I've been making some decent progress, so it's time for another update blog post. Here are some of the highlights:

Data Structures

One of the biggest things that I miss from C++ is STL, the Standard Template Library. It may not be the fastest or most reliable thing on the planet, but it still provides basic structures for storing data that make my life a tad easier. For better or worse, C has none of that. I could probably seek out a library to provide me with some basic data structures, but I figured it would be good practice to roll my own.

The first one that I built was an arraylist (also known in some parts as a vector). It's a fairly simple structure that more or less serves as a self-resizing array. When I was making my demos for Consol Programming, I noticed that I was making arrays that could grow on their own over and over. Since it's a common need, I decided to just add it to dfgame.

I recently also made a self-balancing binary search tree. Trees don't get a whole lot of love, but they do provide a relatively quick way to find values, so I figured it would be good to have an implementation on hand.

Convenience Features

I noticed a number of code bits that kept getting reused during the creation of the dfgame demo, so I also spent some time putting them together into the main library.

I started off by trying to improve the safety of my code a little, with macro wrappers for malloc, calloc, and free. These add extra error checking and logging as well as automatically zeroing pointers when freeing. I also updated my destructors to zero-out pointers via macros as well.

I also added a camera object that combines a transform matrix with a projection matrix to generate a view-projection matrix as needed. Now, I can just tell the camera to move around instead of doing extra math whenever I want to look around in a game.

Meshes, Shaders, and Fonts

Alright, now it's time for the fun stuff. I've made a lot of progress on adding more graphical capabilities to dfgame in the past few months.

I kicked things off with a revamp of how shader programs were handled. Before, there was just a function that compiled shaders, but now shaders are handled by a struct and some functions that allow binding data and retrieving handles. The result is less boilerplate code as well as the potential for more options later on. For instance, I'm planning on tracking uniforms with a hash table, which should make setting values a tad quicker. While I was at it, I also added support for geometry shaders!

My test geometry shader may have had a bug or two...

One obvious feature that dfgame has been missing for a while was loading/rendering actual meshes. I've thrown together a quick-and-dirty OBJ loader, so this issue has now been resolved. Combined with the new shader setup, I can play around with graphics programming much more easily.

The fixed shader

Lastly, I've added some initial support for font loading/text rendering. For the first time in my life, I've finally managed to get TTF fonts to render properly with FreeType. This will be super useful for making any demos/tutorials in the future. I'm currently in the process of creating actual text objects with word wrapping and some other handy features, which will hopefully be working by next week. If you looked at the above images, you might've noticed the Japanese Hiragana character floating to the right of Suzanne. One of the nicest features of my new system is that it has (basic) Unicode support. For now, text objects are going to stick to ASCII only, but all of the necessary groundwork has been laid out, and at least Unicode can still be used for icons and the like.

Next Up

Once text is figured out, I'm going to go back and fill in some holes. There are a few bugs with audio that need to be fixed, and I need to finish the input implementation. After that, I'm probably going to get the html5 version up to speed, while also continuing work on Halberd. I'm also thinking of adding particles somewhere in-between just for the fun of it!