October 8, 1998


Code on the Cob

This week's loonygames brings us another column in the Chris Hargrove article, "Code on the Cob". If you didn't know, this is an article where Chris is writing a program before your eyes in the article. If you'd like a very interesting read, make sure to check out the full article. Here's a tidbit from the article...

First, the bad news. It looks like I'm not going to be able to do the 3D billiards-esque game after all. Actually, it looks like I'm not going to do a 3D game of any sort (at least not for this column). Surprisingly, the reason doesn't have to do with time or complexity, but rather a conflict of interest. The 3D wrapper that I wrote (simply called "UniRender", with a "ur_" prefix), which was going to be the wrapper I used as the 3D example in this column, has started getting used for some programs here at the office. Because of this, it's also starting to get maintained by more than one person, not just myself. Once that started happening, it was no longer a side project that I could openly distribute; instead it became work-related source code. While most of the subsystems I cover or plan to cover in this column are relatively small, 3D graphics was not going to be one of them (UniRender took me several days to get the Glide driver hammered out alone, let alone the D3D driver). Since I'm quite happy with the results, I can't justify spending several more days minimum to write a publicly-available equivalent. Even if I did, it would look almost identical (I like OpenGL so UniRender's API is extremely similar to it, and I doubt I'll change from the OpenGL paradigm anytime soon). So writing a second D3D/Glide/OpenGL-independent layer specifically for this column is pretty unlikely at this point.

Posted by Joe Siegler on October 8, 1998 at 1:00 PM | Permalink
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