Man that I’m tired… It’s been a rough few of days, lot of things to process on my day-to-day life (personal and professional). ADHD hit me hard since the last week, meaning that I have a lot of trouble to focus, even for 5min. And I use all my focus power for my job when I have meetings or with my children. Sadly, this leaves nothing for the Avatar project....
Yay, the big milestone at work is finally over, which means I can have more time to focus on this project. I’m still on the integration of Vulkan, currently initiliazing the lib and all its subcomponents. It’s funny how close it is to DirectX 12. But if I have to choose, I’ll still choose Vulkan because of the broader community, and the fact that the specification and development of Vulkan is “open” (at least the spec, the implementations are all dependant of OS and graphic cards, like Nvidia, and Linus Torvalds has already told what we all think of Nvidia)....
Damn that was easy to convert the C++ code that I had to a pure C code. I’m really more confortable with this language. Managed to migrate the logger and the window handler today. Tomorrow we will start the big piece : Vulkan integration.
The big milestone at work is almost over, so I guess I can go back to the Avatar project. I’ve spend little time on it lately, and only to setup parts of Vulkan initialization (physical device, instance…). I choose to use Vulkan since it’s the more low-level graphic library that the Meta Quest 3 supports, so I hope to have enough room to make something cool with it. I’ve also decided to convert the projet from C++ back to classic, ansi, C....
Yay, today is labor day in France, so no job today ! And no official job means more time for personnal projects ! I finally finished my first blog post on my personal website where I explain how I managed to think about Avatar and what it’s gonna be. I also start the plan for the next post which will be about the Windows Runtime event API and how I managed to write test for it (maybe it will help someone, even the me from 2 years in the future)....
I decided to remove this little rock in my shoes that was my personal website this weekend. I’m more interested by the content I’ll put in it rather by its format. So I’ve setup something simple : a static website generator (Hugo) with a pre-existing template, a Gitlab project, and Gitlab Pages for the deployment. I’ve only linked my personal domain to it and issue a SSL certificate for the HTTPS connection....
Again, I got the envy of using heavy tools for the job on this project (like GitLab and all its tooling for the project management, or Visual Studio Code and all its extensions…), but I managed to resist it, I know me, I can spend several days working on those tools without managing anything relevant for the project. So no changes, I’ve just switch back project managements files from Markdown to TXT files, and reduce the process for my tasks....
Damn, guess that we can call it the tunnel effect ? I’ve spend most of my free time (which means, barely an hour per day, unfortunately) working on unit tests for my class implementing the Windows API. Even if I only do this for myself, I would like to have a lot of unit, integration, and/or end-to-end tests. I’ll have no QA department, no beta tester no nothing. The only way to make sure that my simulation isn’t buggy and will not break the immersion once in VR, is to make sure that everything is tested....
New improvement ! Now I’m able to display a window using Windows Runtime (WinRT) native API and listen mouse and keyboard events. I even close the window if the user press the ESC key. Windows has kind of a strange way of handling events : you create a global Window class that will contain a WindowProcedure. This Procedure will handle all events in a chain-like manner. Then you register the class and instantiate your window using the class....
I found myself worrying too much about the structure of my game engine rather than the game itself. This makes my progress slow, and remove part of the fun from this project, because I WANT to be in the zone with it, to achieve an universe that I’ve always dreamt of. Making a game engine and selling commercial games with it, it’s just bonus. So it should not take over the priorities of the game itself....