Far from the first and unlikely the last, I’ve taken a slight development detour. Firstly, I have migrated this dev blog from WordPress hosted by my web host to this statically generated one hosted on GitHub. I won’t bang on about it, but I was finding WordPress quite cumbersome and exceptionally slow—not just to load on the client side, but to do anything with it. It made the blogging process quite frustrating for me. ...
It’s time to look into getting different geometry into our scene. In the Vulkan version of StaticRectangle, I was using OBJ files for meshes and a 3rd party library called tinyobjloader to load them. This was fine for that application because the size of the files wasn’t much of a concern. I mean it’s always a concern, but it wasn’t as much of a concern in the early stages. It’s something that can be optimised later.1 ...
At the end of my last blog post StaticRectangle was rendering ‘the illustrious spinning cube’. We had a bunch new components, like the camera controller, input / resource manager as well as a top level Application that took ownership of some processes away from the Renderer. The next thing to tackle was splitting up the Renderer further, it was still doing more than just rendering. In fact it was the render function of the renderer that was animating the cube! certainly overstepping its responsibilities as a renderer. ...
By the end of my last post, I had a very boring hot-pink “StaticRectangle”. I gave my wife a demo who was as enthused about a hot-pink rectangle as you can imagine. I showed her all the code it took to produce that rectangle. Her honest response was “why?” I explained how it took lot of leg work to do the things you can’t see. Of course she understood that, but it is remarkable how much work can go into something so unassuming. ...
Not a faithful recreation. I believe the Microsoft one was following the left-hand rule solver (and right when you flipped upside down), which means the mazes must have been ‘simply connected’ or ‘perfect mazes’. There isn’t the topsy-turvy geodesic shape, psychedelic fractals, OpenGL logos, Smiley Face end-point or… rat either. This one is using the Recursive Backtracker to create passages and then Dijkstra’s to find the longest connected path through the maze, and then it follows that. ...
Probably a surprise to no one, but while going through the maze generation exercise I thought it would be nice to display a maze in 3d. There is (though I haven’t gotten to it yet) an entire section of the Mazes for Programmers book dedicated to generating mazes that wrap around 3d shapes, like mazes on cubes, spheres, even a möbius strip! Displaying a maze in 3d isn’t in the scope of the book, but it’s not hard to take the concepts and translate them to 3d. ...