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Image removed for now.

Not a lot to show for today visually. I put some work into restructuring the code to help minimize memory footprint. Now loading the same model multiple times (as long as the texture hasn’t changed) will only load the model into memory once and share the models memory space among all references.

Also, I got started on the collision detection but doing it right is going to take some work.

Image down for now.

Here is the latest screenshot of the game. Got some nice alpha transparency in additive mode on the engines (which flickr slightly–cheap but nice). I created a skybox for the starfield background with a 512×512 texture image but I think a 1024×1024 might be better. For now it will do however. Also, I added an asteroid (as is aparent).

That’s it for now.

This is the updated player ship. I made the cockpit sleeker and added guns to the front.

The saga continues. I’ve now got the texture stuff loading working nicely. My next step is to work with alpha textures, for instance the engine flare, because they need to be rendered in a second pass after the main (dull) objects are rendered. Apparently the best way to do this is to order them by Z coordinate and render them with the alpha blending. After that I’ll worry about lighting and then I should be finally ready to start actually developing the game itself.

This is the prototype spaceship I’m working on for the game I’m writing. Made it in Blender.

These images were rendered in Blender, not in the actual game development environment.

I just finished the first part of a set of Objective-C classes that handle reading Wavefront *.obj files and displaying them via OpenGL. Right now, while vertices, texture coordinates, normal coordinates, and face indices for all 3 are loaded into a datastructure, only the faces are currently displayed. I’ll post a tutorial on how to build an *.obj file reader as soon as I finish the texture part and have a bit of spare time to write one (it turns out that it’s really time consuming to write a tutorial).

I chose the Wavefront *.obj file type because, for what I’m working on, I basically only need mesh data and texture coordinates. Also, I use Blender as my 3D modeler and it has a nice Wavefront export script already.

I spent a couple of hours today converting my website from iWeb to wordpress. The goal was to keep the look and feel roughly the same which has largely turned out great. Wordpress is a lot easier to work with quickly (starting from scratch) than Drupal. Wordpress basically has all of the features I needed and none that I don’t.