DevLog

There’s officially been about a week’s worth of development for Chase.

Today, however, was admittedly disappointing in terms of progress. I started working on a quick reference, since the code was getting more and more complex, and keeping track of parameters for each function was difficult. This would be especially useful, since I’m developing Chase over a long time (up to a week or two between development days). The quick reference, however, wasn’t so quick. It ended up taking me longer to document the different functions than it did for me to actually make some of the functions, so I decided that it was a waste of time, and to ditch it. If it’s getting difficult for me to keep track of things, then it’s probably time for me to re-organize and clean up the code a bit.

I did get a working 3D rotation function in today. It’ll allow me to rotate models, polygons, and coordinates along the x, y, or z axis freely.

I’ll probably devote an entire day to organizing and cleaning up the code soon, and start following a little more strict and consistent standard of coding. I might even start naming functions the same way openGL does with their functions. Being somewhat new to programming,  it’s best for me to set some good habits for the long run.

Even though I haven’t programmed in the past week and a half until today, I’ve been hard at work at composing some of the formulas to be used in Chase. One that’ll be particularly essential is line to polygon intersection detection in 3D space. This would be used in my lighting algorithm and collision detection, unless I pick up a more efficient method of calculating these.

Another feature I’ll implement is culling. There’s a working zbuffer right now, but polygons intersection won’t actually draw that way. I’ll hopefully implement that eventually as well.

By the end of Winter Break, I hope to port the entire engine to C++. I originally chose Processing for ease of creation, and to make playing convenient and available to users from within their browser. Chase is looking a little too ambitious to be ran quickly within the browser. Making Chase in a lower level language (compared to Processing) will probably be a wise decision, since it’ll allow me more resources.