Week 53: graphics enhancements and planning (Patreon)

This week I worked on improving the engine’s graphics capabilities. The problem was that my engine was only capable of supporting 2D textures (sampler2D in the GLSL language). In the last couple of weeks I used workarounds to cope with this limitation. So - you may say - why not stick with these? Well, using “dirty tricks” was fine for the first prototype, but it is not sustainable in the long term: I will soon need to design more cells for the tiled levels. What I really need is texture arrays (sampler2DArray in GLSL). Note that I am not using texture atlases because they have serious troubles with mipmaps (mipmaps are important for getting decent results while zooming out.)

It took 2-3 days and support for texture arrays (and other kinds of texture) is now in my engine. This seems to work nicely, also on browser builds and within the limited-capabilities of mobile phones.

I also fixed a few rendering bugs and started defining a full plan to game completion.  Not very glamorous stuff, but it needs to be done.

Overall, I did quite a bit of work this week, although I haven’t much to show for it. Next week will be similar, as I will be focusing on improving collision and navigation. I should be able to make progress with the game itself after that.