PoV’s Fake LD - 5 Hours
PoV’s Fake LD Compo! Me versus me! Winner takes all.
I actually planned to start this on the weekend, but it’s Monday already. I’ve had a game concept I wanted prototyped for the past few weeks, but between library development work and some portability stuff, I just hadn’t got around to it yet. Maybe a little bit of slacking too. 
So I started today just after 1:00 PM EST (not that I’m forcing a 48 hour limit). The first order of business was to butcher the test suite application from my work in progress geometry tests library. It currently uses a wrapped version of 2D Allegro for graphics (suspiciously featuring many function calls that make it work like a 2D OpenGL, matrix stack and all). Currently the only drawing operations supported are circle and line based, which exactly what I want for geometry tests and prototyping.
Prior to LD11, I was working on a file format and loader/saver for 2D geometry. I call them PolyMap’s. It’s whitespace delimited text based format, sort of like an assembly source file. Unlike the dozens of geometry formats I’ve written in the past, I wanted this one to be generic and extensible. The last one I wrote was was a convoluted 2D mess supporting vertex, texture, geometry and spring constraints animation. Eventually I’d like to assimilate that format in to this one, but I want to keep the format simple enough to do other random things with it.
As is, it’s suitable for creating static background collision (polygons), creating 2D paths/rails, placing “things” that you’d normally find in a game level, and numerous straightforward hacks. The format could also be used to make polygons/circles + springs objects, but I don’t need that right. I’m editing files by hand at the moment, but eventually I’d like to have an easily reconfigurable tool for creating stuff in the format. I’m expecting to hack something together soon.
So anyways, the first order of business was to load and use a PolyMap file with my fake OpenGL rendering code. That came together quickly, so I dived in to some camera stuff. That pretty much brings me to where I am right now.
(The shape with the normals is actually a polygon, I was just too lazy to create a more obvious shape.)
Camera stuff “sorta” works. I can pan and zoom, and the camera is bound to a region of the map (noted in the PolyMap file). Cursor relative zooming doesn’t work right yet, and the bounds don’t restrict correctly when zoomed. Once that’s sorted out, I’ll probably gut the camera code and make it a feature of my fake OpenGL renderer.
Back to the fun.
Tags: screenshot