Code a renderer everyday for 2 hours.

Putte Code and Eng DK30 Quarantine 2020 3 2

Description

I want to get back into the habit of coding to try and rediscover the passion I once felt for programming. I am trying to get back into the programming industry (game technology to be specific) but I have a hard time sitting down and doing the programming due to having contradicting ideas of preconceived notions of being really good and at the same time stressing out whenever I am dealing with an abstract problem that I dont understand.

The goal is to objectivley get a sense of my current state when it comes to problem solving using programming so that I can better understand what I need to do after these 30 days to improve my situation. To focus my efforts I am going to be trying to write a renderer, since its a very well covered topic that I can spend time researching if I get stuck. It has the benefits of being an interest of mine within game technology that I want to explore and being so broad that I wont be able to finish it and can instead focus on evaluating how far I got.

An added bonus is the fact that I get to apply the Linear Algebra which I am studying at school aswell!

Progress and code can be found here https://github.com/Fjellstedt/dk30

Recent Updates

Putte 6 years ago

First Week Update:

Setup and initialize DX11 for Windows 10 (a lot of reading required).
Setup a clear boundrary between the OS and rendering api and the app itself.
Have a textured and lighted cube!
Able to reload my code as the app is running (hot reloading code) (Extra)
Texture and model loading (Work still needs to be done to have a way to load those resources from the app instead of from the renderer, i.e its currently just test code)
Camera movement (Work still needs to be done here, cant rotate the camera, this is the major task for next week, Quaternions)

Also did not accomplish the overall goal of trying to code every day for 2 hours, missed Wednesday and Thursday, but was able to code all the other days for around 2 hours (sometimes more) which was great!

Estimated Timeframe

Apr 24th - May 20th

Week 1 Goal

Ideally I want to leave every week open to exploration of where I am and what I want to explore without feeling burdened by a previous planing that I feel I have to stick with. Every week I’ll see where I am at and flesh out ideas into concrete tasks that I can work on and also spend more time on the previous weeks tasks if I feel I didn’t finish them. This week I want to start off by creating a project and initializing it with the following: - DirectX 11 will be the rendering API I’ll be using, since its familiar to me. - I’ll be using Windows 10 as my development OS, also because its familiar to me.

Tasks:

Having a basic coloured triangle rendered on the screen.
Having a basic coloured cube rendered on the screen.
Have the app respond to input (closing and moving).
Have the app be separated from OS specific code.
Have a functional camera to move around a conceptual scene. More might come if time allows it.

Week 2 Goal

Preliminary Goals for Second Week: (Note to self, not going to have as much time this week due to school work)

Learn about quaternions and try and implement rotation controll for my camera and logic to rotate my cube.
Move texture/model loading into the app and have a way to load files from the app side.
Font rendering (Extra).
Basic Blender modelling, edit model converting pipeline to allow different texturing for different faces (Extra).

Week 3 Goal

To be determined.

Week 4 Goal