r-wos.org

I just finished a part of the terrain-generator …well, let’s call it “the OpenGL project” that generates some three-dimensional primitives.

I think the internal API is quite nice – though, admittedly I may be a bit biased… 🙂

If one wanted a sphere (there is no choice, really – spheres are the only primitives implemented for now) at some point (1,2,3) in space, it’s:

(at 1 2 3
    (sphere))

That sphere has a radius of one unit – a sphere with half of that size would be:

(at 1 2 3
  (scaled 0.5
    (sphere)))

Two spheres with that 0.5 unit radius could be written as:

(scaled 0.5
  (at 1 2 3 (sphere))
  (at 4 5 6 (sphere)))

and so on. Quite simple. These functions return lists (well, actually trees) and those lists can then be passed to a render function.

I’m quite happy with that part of the code looking clean and nice again

• the mindless hacking and testing of the past two weeks began to take its toll.

Screenshot number one (two spheres, obviously):

And screenshot number two:

The feet are only made of scaled and rotated spheres (per-axis scaling, obviously). Once I had one foot defined, the whole high-level rendering code looked like this:

(render
  (at  1 0 -5 foot)
  (at -1 0 -5 (mirrored/x foot)))

Which, I think, looks quite elegant – and the outcome is better than I thought. I just want to avoid doing manual 3D mesh modeling.

You might have also noticed some diffuse light – I switched the standard OpenGL lighting on now. Better lighting and materials are the next point on the TODO list.