GLSL and... stuff

Projects come and go like the weather in Edmonton. I tend to dream up things and never come close to accomplishing anything. I've been playing with Torque off and on since the first release more or less, but have never actually done much of anything. I'm not the sharpest of minds, thats for certain. And I don't know a whole heck of a lot about programming. In fact, everything I've learned has been from hacking apart code snippets and opensource and seeing what does what.

I finally got GLSL working. Well, I got it working about 2-3 weeks ago, I just havent made time to write about it. It works. It loads the GLSL .vert and .frag files, compiles, links, and executes. It loads from a few lines that go into the render code of the object in question, and my little shader manager/loader does the rest. It's ugly as Sin, but it works. :) Now I just need to make the shader itself work so my water doesnt look like something my cat brought up.

The future of this little project is uncertain. I would like to add some more features such as an in-game editor or at least a way of dynamically loading the shader script so that I can edit in a seperate text editor and see my results in Torque. I would also like to get the compile logs to actually display rather than crash me to desktop. :-/


Other projects/potential headaches I am considering? Well... my hovertank game is moving forward, albeit at a molasses slow pace. I was looking at some code for SOAR terrain. I doubt I'll do anything with it though. Um... atmospheric light scattering... I may still attempt this with my GLSL implementation. And the big one: TrackIR support.

BIG thanks to Alex Scarborough for pointing me to a few websites that got me on the right track for GLSL. They seemed overwhelming at first, but once I stared at it long enough and figured out what to ignore and what not to ignore, it started to come together. Now, I know Alex is working on a big kick-ass re-written version of his implementation with lots of bells and whistles for possible release... I will stick to my own for the time being.