Robot War Engine

Progress Update 2017-10-22

This week, RWE learnt to use the OpenGL shader pipeline to display unit meshes. Doing this was a bunch of work but it will make implementing graphical effects more straightforward in the long run. I think it is much better to take this pain now than later when the engine is more reliant on the legacy fixed-function pipeline.

No picture this time I’m afraid. The engine looks the same as it did before, just with completely different internals.

Since I went to all the effort to implement the shader pipeline I did some research into solving the texture distortion problem, thinking it would be fairly straightforward. I found some existing work explaining how to solve this problem but the implementation is more involved than I had hoped, so I’m going to resist the urge to implement it now and put it on the backlog for later. If anyone is interested (and mainly for my reference) the following resources are very informative:

http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~amenta/s12/perspectiveCorrect.pdf

http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/quadrilateral-interpolation-part-1/

http://www.reedbeta.com/blog/quadrilateral-interpolation-part-2/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14971282/applying-color-to-single-vertices-in-a-quad-in-opengl

The goal now is to get back to gameplay logic. I’ll be looking spawning in all the commanders (instead of just one), reading sidedata.tdf to look up which unit is the commander for the player’s side, and reading unit FBI files to properly determine the unit’s model (rather than always picking “armcom”!)