Remember yesterday, I said “If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well…”? Well, today happened to also be a snow day (woohoo!), and I did as I told you. I worked on Chase’s Engine. I’m currently at about 744 lines of code, so I’ve made some progress since I started the conversion. Yesterday’s version included support for handling coordinates, polygons, and models in 3D space. It also had some transformation functions (translate, dilate, and rotate) for coordinates and polygons.

I’ll probably delete those transformation functions the next time I edit. Today I’ve nested support for adding, subtracting, dividing, and multiplying in both the polygon and coordinate function. Not only an add/sub/etc function, but operator overloading (like for +, -, or *). This will allow me to use coordinate and polygon data types, for example:

polygonA * ((coordinateA + coordinateB) / coordinateC)

This will be exactly why I won’t need my transformation functions. Any sort of geometric manipulating can simply done using the nested math functions or use the coordinates/polygons in a formula. I also added in a rotation function to both classes. Another neat feature I’ve implemented is 2 and 3 dimensional support for the Coordinate and Polygon class. I was originally going to have a separate class for 2 and 3 dimensions (eg. Coord2D and Coord3D), but that won’t be necessary with the mighty convenience of function overloading in C++.

The picture above shows a rough draft code flow chart of Chase’s graphic engine. I drew this on the first this month (and year!), and will probably, if not definitely, will change as I refine my concept for Chase’s engine.

Good day! Over the winter break, I began working on Chase’s conversion over to C++. Today, I’ve had the convenience of a snow day, so I took advantage of it and proceeded to work on Chase’s Engine. Note, however, I haven’t really made any *real* progress. I will count this as a day though, since a lot has been done in the conversion.

The conversion isn’t done yet. I’ve got all the coordinate, polygon, and model classes converted (although certainly not finished in terms of features), as well as the transformation functions. If tomorrow also provides the convenience of a snow day, I’ll take advantage of that as well, and hopefully get Chase’s C++ engine up to an equivalent of Chase’s Processing (the API for Java!) engine.

I’ve uploaded a picture of my colorfully written rough draft for how my .h and .cpp files should work out. My compiler (Dev-C++) has an awfully convenient feature which allows me to place individual files in their own folders unlike the Processing IDE, as far as I’m aware of. You can check out the picture by clicking the image to the left/top of this post’s text. Feel free to give me any feedback or comments.

Today, however, was admittedly disappointing in terms of progress. I started working on a quick reference, since the code was getting more and more complex, and keeping track of parameters for each function was difficult. This would be especially useful, since I’m developing Chase over a long time (up to a week or two between development days). The quick reference, however, wasn’t so quick. It ended up taking me longer to document the different functions than it did for me to actually make some of the functions, so I decided that it was a waste of time, and to ditch it. If it’s getting difficult for me to keep track of things, then it’s probably time for me to re-organize and clean up the code a bit.

I did get a working 3D rotation function in today. It’ll allow me to rotate models, polygons, and coordinates along the x, y, or z axis freely.

I’ll probably devote an entire day to organizing and cleaning up the code soon, and start following a little more strict and consistent standard of coding. I might even start naming functions the same way openGL does with their functions. Being somewhat new to programming,  it’s best for me to set some good habits for the long run.

Even though I haven’t programmed in the past week and a half until today, I’ve been hard at work at composing some of the formulas to be used in Chase. One that’ll be particularly essential is line to polygon intersection detection in 3D space. This would be used in my lighting algorithm and collision detection, unless I pick up a more efficient method of calculating these.

Another feature I’ll implement is culling. There’s a working zbuffer right now, but polygons intersection won’t actually draw that way. I’ll hopefully implement that eventually as well.

By the end of Winter Break, I hope to port the entire engine to C++. I originally chose Processing for ease of creation, and to make playing convenient and available to users from within their browser. Chase is looking a little too ambitious to be ran quickly within the browser. Making Chase in a lower level language (compared to Processing) will probably be a wise decision, since it’ll allow me more resources.