Another switch

Well I got tired of OpenGLs archaic documentation, I might go back to it one day but it won't be soon. Instead I'm looking into DirectX again, I played around with it a bit last year and it seemed a little better, at least it comes with tutorials! As for what I want to do with it I still want to build an engine but I've lowered my expectations a bit, I want to build an engine like Minecraft (see one of the previous posts), blocky and simple.

However I've got 5 exams to do over the next few weeks and I'm forcing myself to stay far away from working on anything else; otherwise I'll never study.

Swamped

Don't see much free time ahead to work on anything I actually want to work on. Assignments are due and exams are coming up so not much fun stuff to look forward too :(

I've been mucking around with OpenGL for the most part, trying to write a C++ class to handle my windows and rendering stuff; it's the sort of thing that relies upon exploiting weird parts of the C++ language. Definatly interesting to say the least. Nothing actually works yet but it's the learning process...

On the bright side after all that I've got 3 weeks off and only 4 subjects next semester so I'll have some time to play with then.

Learning OpenGL

OpenGL is a strange beast. It seems that back when it came out with the first generation of graphics cards a whole heap or people were annoyed that the library was mostly undocumented. A few took it upon themselves to write some tutorials and for a while it was good. But that was nearly 10 years ago now, the library has evolved and the tutorials havn't. To add to the complications there's mixed opinion about how things should be done. As with any problem some suggest libraries, others want to hand code everything.

Since I'm just learning I think I'll go the hand code route, I think it's better to understand a system at the lowest level rather than relying upon libraries that may or may not work for you in the end.

So that's what I've been playing with for the past few days. I've got a heap of stuff to work on for Uni for the next week or two so I guess learning will be intermittent but I'll get there in the end :)

Minecraft

This is why I never finish stuff... minecraft.net

Yep another one

Well something had to go here didn't it? Besides there are some things that are just too long for twitter.

So here it is, yet another blog for the internets. I switched software this time, I think wordpress was probably overkill for my needs so now I'm using Chypr. It seems nice so far, missing a few extensions I'd like but it runs way less queries then wordpress and I'm all for more lightweight apps.

Well if past experiance is anything to go by I'll probably update this every few months but you never know, I might actually use this one!

Edit: I added a project list of all the stuff I'm currently working on. Link is on the right in the sidebar.