Lions, Leadwerks, and Androids, Oh My!
Entry posted by Josh ·
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It took a while to figure out, but I was able to get drag and drop interaction working on OSX. (Thanks to Seb Hollington for helping with the coordinate transformation stuff.) Now the editor lets you assign textures by dragging them onto texture slots, just the same as on Windows. There's one last step before the editor code becomes totally platform-agnostic. A file system watcher needs to be implemented on Mac. On Windows, this was fairly straightforward, because there is a built-in API for detecting all files events. OSX has something called FSEvents, but they only detect changes to a directory; they don't actually tell you what file changed, or how it changed. QT has a file system watcher, but from what I can tell, it looks like it doesn't detect new folders that get created. I think this is something I am going to put off for now and slowly research it.
As can be expected, OpenGL support on OSX Lion has some issues to be worked out. I haven't actually had a confirmed bug where the driver's behavior is violating the specification, but there are some weird things. Due to the difference between Mac and Windows file paths, I was accidentally not attaching any shader objects to a shader program, yet it successfully linked! This actually does not contradict the OpenGL specification, but ATI and NVidia drivers would have raised an error. The commands for MSAA textures are working, but the highest supported multisample level is one, meaning no multisampling. Again, this is all in accordance with the OpenGL specification, but the GPU in my iMac is capable of doing 16x MSAA textures. I got around a few issues and sent Apple a demo of LE3 running on Lion; The rendering flashes on and off every few seconds, and I have no idea why that could be, but there's nothing more for me to do on it since it's not raising any errors. I think Apple is moving in the right direction, and they'll eventually get things worked out, but I would not recommend buying a Mac for high-end graphics just yet.
I met with an Android developer yesterday about getting LE3 running on Android devices. Since we already have it running on Windows, OSX, iPhone, and iPad, adding one additional platform should not be too hard at this point. Compiling C++ for Android is a pretty complex task, so it makes sense to have someone else work on this area while I focus on the core engine and editor. Once we have it running, the "platform milestone" for LE3 will be reached, with support for all platforms we intend to target at launch.
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