OpenGL

The texture loading code for G-Engine was written early in development, when I was eager to see some on-screen graphics to demonstrate tangible progress on the project. And then that code stayed relatively untouched for years. However, a recent GitHub issue highlighted a bottleneck - installing a mod containing very large textures caused scene load times to skyrocket!

In this post, I’ll explain how this problem was investigated and fixed. It may be a helpful read if you want to learn more about loading image data to be used by a graphics API such as OpenGL, or if you want to see how naive texture loading code can be improved.

In the last G-Engine post, we got the game loop and frame “delta time” calculations working. We’ve now got a blank, empty game window - yay? Despite the unimpressive result, we’ve got a beating heart under the hood: an update loop being called at roughly 60 frames per second.

Empty windows are no fun, so my next goal is to get something - anything - rendering in the game window. Graphics are a vital and exciting part of any game, and rendering provides us vital visual feedback as we move on to implementing and debugging 3D object placement, cameras, rotations, and data loading for 3D meshes and animations.

This post will focus on rendering a single triangle on screen. Though the result is simple, we’ll cover a lot of ground towards building a 3D rendering system that will be extended and enhanced as we move forward.