korg on 2006/04/01 19:52:

Yep. Not recoverable im afraid.. :( Seems that my brain isnt big enough to keep an opengl engine and game internals in my brain at 6:46. :( It was a stupid design decision that I made late the other night and my brain marked it as 100% working so I didnt revisit it in the morning.

And I thought Id actually get something going this time. *sigh*. Oh well.. nexttime for sure, eh? :)

Stuff I learned this time....

• Know your library first Again I had problems with the graphics library (opengl this time). It was only wednesday before had enough of a feel for it to allow me to find bugs in a reasonable time. Even then I was getting opengl issues right through to the last night (mostly my messing up, but still.... )
• Opengl isnt forgiving Annoying that it Exceptions some times but not others. False sense of security detected in user... ;)
• Opengl is actually kinda coool With some natty displaylists I was getting 60 FPS constantly. Nice performance from python I thought.
• Viewports are cool
• I spend too much time over designing and making code generic Usually thats a win, but not in a time limited contest. Especially where you have to go back and redesign because of misundersandings about the library or maybe worse leave stuff you dont use in because you dont have time to rip it out. (My engine still has two different unused methods to do transparency rendering).
• I under plan my time I need to work out a better sequence steps.
• I repeat mistakes Many of these issues are problems I had last time. Although that time was problems with PIL mixed with pygame (any my first real tinkering with alpha channels), the over design problem hit me again. You think Id have learnt to avoid spending too much time on UI stuff too early.
• I bug hunt too much I find that I have to work out why stuff doenst work (a good thing in a sysadmin to be sure, but not so good when working with time critically cobbled together code that you only partially understand). Having said that, some of those hour long period of wading through opengl are what got me a better understanding of it. (Even if the eventual error was a mistake on my part, it still ment that I went back and worked out what opengl was doing).

Oh well. I had lots of fun and I think I came out of this contest with a much better idea of opengl and how to code it. I understand now why some of the libraries ive been looking at do things the way they do and Im feeling brave enough to actually leap in and try some coding in those languages.

Next contest im 100% for using opengl and hopefully that will get rid of that annoying learning curve. :)

Im sad that I didnt get anything going, but I learnt way more this time and last time. Im totally sold on opengl as a base library (or anything that uses it) and Im looking forward to coding some more opengl sometime soon.

Im signing off now... Im starting to drop whole key words out of sentences.