Picking Up St(r)eam...
Entry posted by Josh ·
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I'm making good progress on LE3 now. First I had to write basic functionality for things like strings and file access. It was tedious, but now that it's done I've got a nice library of functions that make programming all that much easier. The string commands include Trim(), Split(), ExtractExt(), StripDir(), etc. I know the Boost library has some functionality like this, but I'd like to avoid relying on third party libs whenever possible. I've also got the file system working, with a FileFactory class that can be extended to handle internet or other files. The commands are simple and easy to use:
Stream* stream = ReadFile("myfile.txt");
int n = stream->ReadInt();
delete stream;
The regular file commands work for .pak file reading as well.
These features will also be useful for Codewerks, my meta language that uses C++ compilers. I have put development of this on hold for now, but I am still very interested in picking it back up again at a later date. It's nice to see that everything I originally envisioned for that will work just fine.
The OpenGL 3/4 renderer is started. The changes from OpenGL 2.1 to the latest version are pretty minor. Since I already know OpenGL pretty well, I don't think the LE3 renderer will be too hard at all.
The texture class is working. Each texture has one or more "frames" for animated textures.
So far everything should be cross-platform compatible, but I'll be picking up an iMac pretty soon so I can try it out on MacOS. I'm going to use XCode on Mac and Visual Studio on Windows. I'll probably use Code::Blocks or CodeLite for Linux.
I'm comfortable with C++, and have enough knowledge of it now to finish the project.
So I guess to sum it up, this week marks the end of the learning and experimenting phase, and the start of actual coding. Coding LE3 in C++ is about the same as coding it in BlitzMax, although a bit slower. The point is I am just dealing with my own code and design instead of worrying about learning new conventions, so I think things will speed up now.
Thanks for all your ideas and feedback in the feature requests forum. Some really good suggestions have come from the community that I will incorporate in LE3.
On a final note, LOL Week was a tremendous success. Here are some of my favorite images that were posted.
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