Recent blog entries for jivera

Today I figured out how to get the equation I needed for a plane, so tomorrow I can continue coding on my semester project. I was also playing with OpenGL and GLX a little bit just a while ago and had some fun with that (while I do have a firm understanding of C++, I haven't done much graphical stuff with it so it's been fun learning Xlib and OpenGL recently even though they're C libraries not C++).

I was also thinking about how to implement the Model/View/Controller paradigm in a game, but I still don't have a good understanding of how it's supposed to work and have been finding it difficult to find any good documentation on it in that context. Gamedev.net has a few articles, but they're rather vague.

Didn't do much today... I donated blood to the American Red Cross at school and bought a few new shirts, but programming wise I haven't done anything new.

For my semester project in Computer Science I'm programming a (very) simple OpenGL like class layer on top of the simple 2D class we were given. I've already decomposed the problem into a few design patterns, but the main problem I'm having at the moment is figuring out the formula to find the Cartesian Plane equation given three vertices (I need this to determine if the camera is on the same side of a triangle as a light source to know if I should shade it or not). Once I figure that out I should be able to continue with my project a bit more.

A thread at gamedev.net got me to thinking about a C++-only object model recently and I've been pondering that on and off a lot. I personally would think it'd be interesting to have an object model similar to XPCOM (Mozilla), but taking a greater advantage of Standard C++ and dropping the multiple language bindings. It'd probably amount to nothing more than an experiment (since any major developers would likely prefer to use CORBA or XPCOM), but it might still be an interesting project.

Finally, I still have yet to get much under way with the game I've been wanting to work on for the past month or two. Since battles are very similar in concept to Chess (except that it introduces many elements common to role playing games), I've been trying to find a well documented object oriented Chess model to learn from. I can't figure out which object is responsible for knowing the location of the units/pieces.