Open GL'n

The "organize" approach is still paying off. Well that and getting a hook up that lets me use my much larger PC monitor with the dinky macbook monitor.

So I've moved onto OpenGL on the iPhone which will end up being the way we render most of the graphics in the game. So far, I've simply just reproduce the demo I created using Core Graphics techniques. Next step is to "kick it up" a notch.

For my next demo, I'd like to master a few different things:

Demo Overview
Create a field of sprites that are running an animation. Allow the user to click on the screen and have the camera ease to that position. Allow the user to also click and drag to slide the camera along that specific path. Allow the user to zoom out and move around then zoom back in.

Demo Goals

1. Learning how to draw 2d textures
2. Create a 3dVector and 4x4 matrix class
3. Creating a "frame" class that allows for easy maintenance of matrix (possible space for nesting frames..but this may not be necessary)
   
4. Creating a functional camera class
5. Detecting and using drag events

I feel this should be plenty to do over the next couple of weeks. I'm not working every single day after work cause I found this burns me out and leaves me an even grumpier mess so I've been moving at a slower pace and finding that I am more productive during that time then just plain hatin' myself (I have some serious issues).

Once I got a basic OpenGL renderer up (a modified EAGLView class created with the GL template from XCode), I started getting this ol' feeling of new Flash Development. While its not a scripting language by any means, the enviroment has so much built in functionality that I'm finding I can move onto fun stuff pretty quickly without worrying about every piece of technology to do every little damn thing. Flash is a lot like that. You get a lot provided for you, its just a matter of using it. Once I get the camera panning around, I'll get that nerd excitment I've wanted for a while.