Some who read me on a regular basis might be wondering what ever happened to the RPG I was writing in VisualStudio using Microsoft’s XNA technology. Truth is, it never went anywhere. Like a lot of past projects, I got very psyched about it, wrote a bunch of code, and then school started and I got way too busy to finish it. I haven’t touched the code since I wrote that post, but now I’ve got some new ideas.
Last term in school, I took an excellent course on OpenGL programming with C++. The course covered how to create and render 3D graphics, with study lent to topics such as window management, points, vertices, and polygons, lighting and shading, hidden surface removal, and texturing. My earlier post about the MAX 3D Engine was a byproduct of that course.
Since then, I’ve discovered a managed .NET wrapper around the OpenGL libraries called the Tao Framework that allows you to (in theory) code any graphics application in Visual Basic or C# that you could in C++, with the added bonus of the pretty IDE, code completion, top of the line window handling procedures, and the .NET libraries. Now at this point, if you’re a graphics programmer, you’re laughing aloud at my outrageous claim – managed, run-time interpreted code could never be fast enough to run a video game! You may be correct. Frankly, I have no idea, as I haven’t yet had the time to write a full video game.
What I have come up with however, are two starter projects for anybody wishing to try their hand at OpenGL programming using Tao and Visual Basic.NET. The code in both is well documented, easy to follow (especially if you are familiar with standard OpenGL routines), and seems to run at a reasonable 60fps. Now, I can’t tell until I add a few more polygons to the scene whether this framerate is an artificial limit applied by the environment, or if interpreted code actually has no hope of ever running a game at a reasonable speed. That is an experiment for a later day. For now, I will simply share these starter projects for all to use. If you do something with them, please leave a comment and let me know how it went.
Tao2D Test Harness:
A simple application that spins a tri-coloured, smooth-shaded triangle around the y-axis.
Source Code: Tao2D Source VB.Net.zip
MD5 Hash: 4DA0FC584B1EF8738B3B9CA4C1F55388
Binaries: Tao2D Binary.zip
MD5 Hash: 611382CB00CADD860A81A85573CBA763
Tao3D Test Harness:
A simple application that spins a really crappy looking cone around the x-axis
Source Code: Tao3D Source VB.NET.zip
MD5 Hash: 8D54DB42109F12C745AD14922FF8850E
Binaries: Tao3D Binaries.zip
MD5 Hash: 5D4CD4D02B3EE1194758A543DF36C034
As always, I recommend using Tyler Burton’s Hash Verifier program to verify the integrity of these downloads.
Trackbacks /
Pingbacks