I have been out of business for a long time, too long in fact, but I gathered all my strength and decided I still wont surrender , so I decided to take a few steps to continue with my project.
First thing I thought was I needed to improve my Opengl Skills, that involved:
- Drooping my Opengl1.x skills ( forgetting all the immediate drawing stuff)
- Start with at least Opengl 2.1 (vertex and fragment shaders, + working with VAOS)
I could have chosen Opengl 3.3 or even 4.3, but that would mean dropping support for a wide amount of persons including all the "vga integrated in the motherboard" + mac users, so Opengl 2.1 + shader model #120 was my target.
I started learning on "modern opengl tutorial sites" like:
- http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/
- http://ogldev.atspace.co.uk/index.html
- http://arcsynthesis.org/gltut/
So I went my way working on it until I had an idea about how to use basic functions, and made a simple class to load exported objects on "Wavefront .obj" format, the class is quite simple to use:
- cobj myasset; //instance an object..
- myasset.loadmodel("land.obj","map.tga"); //load the obj file + the texture
- myasset.draw(MVP); //draws the object!
So I had an object loader, what now? I needed somewhere to place the models, that was my second dilemma: I have no artistic skill so how to make a map?...
-libnoise (http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/) came to rescue me.. again, I just recovered an old project I used to generate noise maps and made an exporter so I could write obj files with the noise map, that is basically an height map + a color map, after a few attempts I got it working, and I was able to load it into blender!!
And, adding a model + a transparent sea texture I got the final result:
<back into the business again!>
I'm exhausted, but at the same time very happy, good things coming soon!
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