Updates

So I’ve been very poor at keeping up with this blog so far, and there hasn’t been much movement on the projects I noted down in my first post here. It’s been a busy few months, I’m now moving to a new job, but there is some project progress to update nonetheless, just not quite on the projects I was expecting.

So as follows is what’s currently rattling around in my head in terms of projects.

Rust and Krooza
So I’ve heard on the grapevine that rust is the latest and greatest systems programming language. Sounds like it’ll be worth me investing a little bit of time into over the next couple of years or so. I’ve been using rustlings to get started and I’m very impressed with it, and I’d be inclined to make some contributions to the project at some point in the future (it also makes me want to write a similar learning environment for C or C++!). Following the theme of learning by doing, I’m also involved in a collaborative project to write a 2D game called Krooza using the Rust based game engine Amethyst. There should hopefully be more updates on this in my next post.

Graphics Programming
Not at the forefront at the moment, but I’d made good progress with this and I’ll be sticking with it. I think I’m going to amalgamate my DOOM and scratchpad projects by writing a WAD loader for my scratchpad program so that I can essentially walk around DOOM levels. Might then play around with shaders some more but I’m more likely to do that with the game in Amethyst. With the new job it looks like I might have the opportunity to work with OpenGL for visualisation in some capacity so that might be what leads me back here in the future.

Writing/Side Gig
So I still have this idea knocking around of doing some kind of writing as a side gig to make a little extra money. I’m going to look into a side gig in general, I mentioned porting in my last post and I’ve also been thinking I could offer freelance development and debugging services on a few different websites. I think with the writing I’ll see how this blog goes along. I might do a couple of postmortems of past projects to test the water. Could be fun, we shall see.

So that’s the updates of what’s in my brain at the moment. I think I’ll try and do these monthly. With the new job starting tomorrow I’ll have my momentum back. Looking forward to it.

Current Project List

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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…

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

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