White Triangle

From a compiler/language perspective, this isn't an interesting post. All I've done is incorporate OpenGL into my existing SDL2 support from the Pong game, earlier.

It was a bit of a hassle merging the SDL2 OpenGL tutorials (which are, I guess, pretty new, and pretty spartan) with the NeHe "drawing a shape on the screen" tutorial (which has a SDL1 implementation). But, hey, there you go. A triangle, rendered in perspective, in my language.

If you're familiar with the NeHe tutorials, you might expect there to be a square on the screen, too. And the square does get drawn, just not at the point that you see here - I have a few different "game modes", and in the first state, I draw a triangle. After several seconds, I switch states, and then I draw the square. So that's even fancier than the NeHe tutorials. Take that!

For the next foreseeable bit, I'll be hooking up OpenGL to my language, so that's not pretty, but it's what needs to happen. I suppose I can write a Python script to grab GL.h and provide some amount of interface for free.


A few things that I should add to my TODO list:

• GLES support - I'm using the old OpenGL glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES) style. That won't fly on all the platforms I intend to hit, so I'll rewrite the triangle using a vertex array, which hopefully my language will be able to support natively.
• Strings - pretty soon, I'm going to want to accept user input (for a high score list?) and show text onscreen (on an about screen?) without the gross approach I used in Pong, which included a draw_char call that put a character at a position on the screen - no word wrapping, no language support for strings. Maybe that won't be too hard.