Week 35: flames on the robot's engine
Added 2023-07-21 16:54:52 +0000 UTCOn Monday I focused on getting the flames right. In particular, the flames now flow in the right direction and do that in a continuous way, i.e. they don’t switch on/off abruptly. They also change direction smoothly. I am satisfied with the final effect. I did some experiments rendering shadows, just to see whether they add to the scene. I think the answer is yes. I have a first SDF-based implementation, which is kinda wrong though, as the shadow doesn’t really reflect the Lorentz-contraction or Wigner-rotation of the robot. I’ll have to come back to this.
I spent the remaining four days of the week working on the engine’s rendering code and doing work I wanted to do for a long time. This was quite intense. In summary, I completed the Graal library (Graal stands for GRAphics Abstraction Library.) Finally, this is the only piece of code that includes OpenGL headers. All GPU functionality is now abstracted via Graal. I also did quite substantial work on how shader uniforms are set. The main aim is to simplify how lights are handled.
One key part of the work is creating data structures that can be used to set the uniforms efficiently. It is a bit embarrassing to admit that so far the engine has been calling glGetUniformLocation every frame to get the uniform locations. Well, this is about to be fixed soon.
