Gwynne's Blog

“For all we know, at this very moment, somewhere far beyond all those distant stars, Benny Russell is dreaming of us.” – Avery Brooks as Benjamin Sisko, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, “Far Beyond the Stars”.

Working on Missions at the level I am so far, I feel about that far away from the game’s universe. Still, there’s been a bit of progress today.

1. First off, I went to grab the main screen out of the original Missions. This time I didn’t have to play around with PICT resources (I did anyway, but that’s besides the point). There was a nice non-composited Photoshop document sitting around with all its individual layers to play with. I tore into it with a vengeance – poor file. In the end, I didn’t do much, just added my copyright to Michael’s and erased the UI buttons.
   
   Erased the UI buttons?
   
   Well, yes. Having looked through the old code, Michael had used QuickDraw as it was meant to be used and been drawing the user interaction with the buttons by writing over the bitmap data with DrawString(). An time-honored and venerable way of doing things in the Mac Toolbox, but not at all suited to efficiency in an OpenGL application. Wiping out the buttons was the first step in separating them out entirely for compositing as OpenGL textures. Probably overkill anyway in the end, but keep in mind this is a learning experience for me and I figured I’d use the general code instead of special-casing this screen more than necessary.
2. Once I had the main screen image re-composited into a nice PNG (bye-bye PICT!), I plugged that into glTexImage2D() and voila, the main screen now displayed in the window! Of course, that screen was bereft of all the nice details that make Missions what it is, so I set about adding the little touches back in. The most obvious of these was the version number in the lower-right corner of the screen. It took me a while to figure out how to get the arcane combination of string drawing in NSImage and writing into an OpenGL texture object correct, but I got there in the end thanks to a little timely help. Incompatible coordinate systems and swapped RGBA/BGRA component ordering were the order of that couple of hours. Whew. A few calls to -[NSBundle objectForInfoDictionaryKey:] and several searches online for versions of the embedded fonts that worked properly later, I had the version number composited neatly on top of the background. Progress!
3. Of course, the code was a disaster at this point. I’d gone through so many dozen iterations of fixing my snafus… well, long story short, I took some time out to reorganize, and got my texture loading and sprite management all neatly separated into their respective classes, including having the sprite class (replacing Michael’s use of SAT in the original code) do the necessary coordinate transformation so I could use the numbers from the original code cleanly. Not to mention some carefully managed global constants to hold useful values, such as references to the fonts and custom colors being used.

And here’s the reward of all that hard work:

First draft of the Missions of the Reliant main screen

I know it doesn’t look like much, but as with all programming, it’s the infrastructure behind it that counts. It’s something most users never see and don’t realize the sheer difficulty of maintaining, but it’s there and it’s important. With all that structure in place, once I’ve gotten some sleep I can make much faster progress tomorrow.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Alliance Headquarters
Stardate 2310.11299452429843

Well, having the project file for Missions in place, I went to organize some of the resources – sprites, backgrounds, strings, all that fun jazz, and there’s plenty of it. In particular, I found myself re-engineering a couple of icons to support the much larger icon sizes we’ve gotten in Mac OS since the ancient days – 8-bit 32×32 icons are well and good, but how’s a 32-bit 512×512 snapshot with alpha channel sound? Pretty good? I thought so. A couple hours tweaking around in GraphicConverter and Photoshop Elements later, I had a nice large icon for the application and saved games. Of course I kept the original icon for 32×32 and 16×16 sizes.

One might ask, what the heck was I doing playing around with graphics when there’s so much code to write? There are two answers. One, that’s just the way I work: Once I get it into my head to finish a task, I get a bit exclusive about it. Two, it was fun, and a part of adding the tiny little bits of personal touch to the port. I wouldn’t want to detract from Michael’s work, of course, but at the same time I am putting in quite a bit of effort to bring that work to the modern audience, so I see no reason that effort can’t be remotely noticable.

Of course, most of the original graphics were vector models done in an old program called Infini-D. Unfortunately, I can’t find this program or anything which can read its format…

Having finished poking around in Photoshop Elements, I went to look up the fundamentals of OpenGL 2D on Mac OS X. Four hours of playing around with CGImage, NSOpenGLView, and glTexImage2D later, I figured out why the alpha channel in the PNG I was using to test was being completely ignored: I never called glEnable(GL_BLEND);. Egg on face much? Oh well. At least I finally made it work. I now have a basic setup in place with which to draw sprites and backgrounds in the game window. Not bad for a few hours and not having done OpenGL in five years, if you ask me.

At least I was vindicated in thinking NSOpenGLView had to be at least a little bit useful despite loud claims by OpenGL coders that I might as well resign myself to subclassing NSView and doing the setup by hand!

That’s about it for today. I’d like, however, to share this amusingly useful little macro with my fellow Objective-C users who aren’t in GC-land yet. I wanted a nice compact way to add a Core Foundation object to an NSAutoreleasePool without doing lots of ugly typecasts. The result was this:

#define CFAutorelease(cftyp)        ((typeof((cftyp)))[((id)(cftyp)) autorelease])

Nothing like cheating a bit with typeof(); despite appearances, the expression is not evaluated twice! That let me write bits like CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CFAutorelease(CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB()); instead of CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = (CGColorSpaceRef)[(id)CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB() autorelease];. Much more readable, IMHO. The fact that sending autorelease to nil/NULL does nothing and returns NULL is just a lovely little bonus. This doesn’t work quite right in GC code, of course, so don’t try it there.

The other thing that made me happy was thumbing my nose at all the “ARB_texture_rectangle is so useless” noise. Sure, if you’re doing fancy 3D drawing, a texture with non-parameterized coordinates and no non-clamp wrapping and no mipmaps or borders is a problem. Not so much in simple 2D. Why complicate backwards compatibility by using ARB_texture_non_power_of_two?