April 9 - April 15
In the first week, we wanted to be able to set up the foundation for our engine. We have an OpenGL base that is at minimum able to render at least simple primitives on the screen along with a source build. We also did research on OpenGL based video game engines and real-time lighting / camera effects. We also had a lot of time going into preperation for the miderm.
- set up the dependencies: GLEW, GLFW, GLF, and SOIL.
- basic window interface, with 2d primitives.
We unfortunately had a lot of trouble creating the initial setup, which delayed our efforts in making progress on this project. We began the project using the CGL library that was included in all of the previous 184 projects, but eventually we decided it would not give us the leverage we needed to accomplish our goals. Thus, we decided to build GLFW and other libraries such as GLM ourselves. However, we struggled a lot with trying to compile the project source. In particular, we struggled to figure out how to create a working cmake configuration that would compile all of the required dependencies and link all the libraries correctly. Initially, we tried modifying portions of the CMakeLists from the 184 projects, but we were unable to figure out how to address problems that occurred such as claims of missing libraries despite having their source installed. These issues were resolved by using pieces from a simpler CMakeList that we found on Github. However, we once again ran into a delay where the build would not compile across both Linux and OSX. We resolved that by re-cmaking GLFW in the dependency folder on each platform before cmaking the overall project build.
We are a somewhat behind schedule, but we still believe we can accomplish our original goal of lighting effects such as god rays and vignetting. We also intend to create a simple method for procedurally generating a scene using at least basic primitives such as cubes. Within the next week, we also want to refactor our code, as most of the functionality is contained within one main file rather than split in a modular fashion.
April 23 - April 29
We will be implementing at least one of the lighting effects from the proposal and also dividing up the main file into modular portions. If possible we would also like to create a function that can procedurally generate structures from geometric primitives and place them throughout the scene. If time allows, we will also try to enable texture mapping for the generated objects.
April 30 - May 6
We will finish the rest of the lighting effects that were not completed last week and test and debug our code to try and remove any remaining errors.