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?