My first post here is basically going to be a list of what I’m working on at the moment. The goal is to have one centralised place where I can keep track of what I’m working on and any other ideas that are rattling around my head at any given time.
So the TODO list is currently as follows:
- Graphics programming with OpenGL – This is split into two distinct parts at the moment. I have my scratchpad which I’m building up to figure bits and bobs out. It’s reasonably robust at the moment and modular enough that I can easily come back to it whenever I have time and pick it back up and meddle with it.
- Graphics programming with OpenGL part 2 – The second OpenGL project is making some contributions to the OpenGL wikibook. The work I’m doing at the moment is around the model loader and efficiently loading precomputed normals from .obj files. It’s early days on this one, but I’m thinking around how I can do this efficiently and concisely. Then of course I’d like to write up what I’ve done and actually make an effective contribution to the wikibook.
- SDL2 bindings for Java – I’m currently wrapping the latest version of SDL2 up in Java, mainly as a companion piece to my next project but also because, bizarrely no one else has done this for SDL2 as far as I can tell. There’s just some very out of date bindings for SDL1 floating around out there that haven’t been updated in a good six years or so.
- Games programming book (SDL2 and Java) – I’m currently writing a tutorial book for programming with SDL2 in Java. There’s a few different bits of rationale behind this one. I’m looking at self publishing the ebook on Amazon (and potentially other places) and generating some passive income. Whether this will work, I honestly have no idea, but it will be the worlds first SDL2 and Java book since I’m the guy writing the bindings too. I chose to use Java because it’s beginner friendly, and since my book is aimed squarely at beginners I think the cross over makes sense. Additionally, I’m using this as an opportunity to bone back up on Java – weirdly I tend to prefer it over C# even though they are incredibly similar.
- Chocolate Doom OpenGL port – This is something that I started, and was going pretty promisingly but then just fell by the wayside due to interest in other stuff. I do want to get back into this at some point but it’s very much on hiatus for now.
- Linmath++ – I’ve been using a header only maths library instead of GLM purely because it was less faff to set up and I can bundle it in with my scratchpad code. It is missing some support for things I now need though (mat3 support, for example) so I’m going to be looking into upgrading this at some point (unless someone else has made their own version…)
Now we’re onto the ideas section where I just want to list the ideas that haven’t formed into projects yet but that I hope will in the future. Without further ado…
- Game porting – I’ve been pretty interested in the idea of game porting for a while, and there might be some commercial gain to be made from this idea at some point. What I want to do here is reach out to a few indie game companies who have yet to port their games to Linux for example, and then pitch for the contract to port their games. This might pan out – who knows.
- Porting for fun – In a similar vein to the last idea, it might be nice to take an open source game and port it to a device or platform of my choice. The PSP comes to mind as I’ve been getting back into playing around with homebrew software on that (after ~10 years on hiatus)
That’s all. Brain dumped onto page.
BMG Software 