It's getting a bit nippy out
There has been progress on my “fly endlessly down some sort of canyon” iPad thing. Quite a lot of this progress has been non-visual infrastructure code where I’ve taken hastily hacked test code and rewritten it in a more reusable and thoughtful manner. The main visual changes are that we’re now flying over ice and snow after I watched the BBC’s Frozen Planet series and decided the bit where we fly down a canyon carved out of the Arctic ice sheets looked kind of cool. It’s also winter and getting a bit cold outside.
I’ve also got some basic tilt controls working so that the ship moves left and right depending on how you tip the device. Tapping the screen makes the ship rise and fall. I need to adjust this as everything is a bit slow and smooth but for now it’ll be enough to let me try the next thing on my todo list. There’s a video to watch below.
So what’s next? Maybe a few nights spent playing with Milkshape3D drawing low polygon ships to shoot at. I can do quite a lot of gamey stuff if there’s some opponents, rather than plugging away at invisible infrastructure code – I wrote some linar algebra to generate an orthographic view for the HUD (that’s the thing saying ‘Yo’ on the screen) and worked out how to have two different shader programs running. All that effort to make a small square appear on the screen. And lots of effort working out how to make this automatically scale to different screen sizes, which works rather well and means an iPhone version just “plops” out the compiler with no effort.
It takes hours to make that stuff work, but since it doesn’t produce anything worth looking at I’ve not bothered writing about it! I really need to work out some sort of tripod arrangement for my iPhone so I can record videos better, one-handed iPad waving while holding a phone doesn’t work very well.
