T w e n t y S i d e d
Good Robot has been on my mind lately. I keep coming back to the fact that I put a few months into it and didn’t finish it. But then I remember that on top of gameplay concerns I’ve also got a bunch of annoying technology problems to worry about and I lose my enthusiasm.
The central part of the technology problems come from [my usage of] GLSL – the OpenGL shader language. The rest of my code – talking to the filesystem, input devices, AI, and gameplay – is basically solid, but the shaders are a mess. On one machine robots would strobe, randomly rendering or not from one frame to the next. Another tester reported that walls didn’t render. Another had the robots and walls render fine, but powerups were invisible. Another person had strange slowdowns that should not have been happening on their given hardware.
The center of the problem is that I’m not very knowledgeable regarding GLSL. I’ve only gotten around to messing with it in the last couple of years, and I’ve only learned enough to accomplish the few simple things I need to do. This leaves great big blind spot in my knowledge where problems can hide. It creates situations where I can do something the wrong way and have it work on my machine, and malfunction a dozen different ways elsewhere.
But to correct this problem I have to deal with another one: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Frontier Rebooted Part 1: Back to School”
