INFR3110 Blog 2

Well, not much to say here in terms of development progress. Learning 2LoC has been a much greater challenge than anticipated. The simultaneous requirement of needing to work on both capstone and develop a game specifically for this course is already taking its toll. The early design for the game is still in its infancy, which is to say, behind schedule when contrasted with our peers in GDW.

The first hurdle of homework questions was relatively straightforward. The only engine related question I completed took longer than the other 3 Maya-based combined. I definite sign of things to come… The 2loc engine related question I completed was the per fragment/per vertex lighting shader; simple due to the availability of relevant project samples. An important note, as there are not enough samples to sufficiently complete the homework questions.

The next difficulty set – medium is going to be more challenging. Over the past few days, I have spent hours trying to get shadow mapping working; to no avail. The primary difficulty lies in understanding how to pass a specific matrix transformation to the shader, the engine seems to automatically calculate and pass the MVP directly to the shader using a specific name; the need is to intercept these calculations or to calculate them outside the engine. Learning the functionality of the engine and finding just what hidden and obscure feature that allows me to accomplish a specific task is a real trial. Because of this, I am required to take debugging to a whole new, laborious level – that of having to check the transformation matrices outputted by different functions to compare with hand written calculations. Perhaps someday I will find the hidden view projection matrix function.

The lack of documentation means I have to take and archive every bit of new information about the engine. It would seem that I have to wait, wait until the course catches up to the requirements of some homework questions before proceeding further. Perhaps I was a little too eager in pursuing that which has yet to be discussed. My sources tell me that shaders and integration of external engines like Bullet will be covered in the coming weeks.

Although this course’s setup for homework questions is more generous than that of previous courses, this invisible wall of difficulty in learning 2loc, is obstructing me from putting to use my preceding knowledge.