There’s tonnes of blogs out there, so I only talk about the bits that other people have missed, or were too polite or inexperienced to cover. Often that means I’m the one pointing out the flaws (most people don’t want to write bad things. Screw that; ignoring the bad points […]
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This is a blog post I wrote 6 months ago, and my life got too busy to finish it off, finish testing the code, improving the text. So I’m publishing this now, warts and all. There are probably bugs. There are bits that I could explain better – but I […]
There’s a famous animated GIF of an infinitely swirling snake (here’s one that’s been Harry Potterised with the Slytherin logo): Impressive, right? What if I said it only relies upon one variable, and that you can reproduce this yourself in 3D in mere minutes? It’ll take quite a lot longer […]
I’ve started a new open-source project to make an ES designed specifically to be ported to different platforms and work the same way, with the same class/method names, on every platform: Aliqua.org Here’s some thoughts on “why” I’m doing this, and “how” I’m making it work…
If you’ve been following my tutorials on OpenGL ES 2 for iOS, by the time you finish Texturing (Part 6 or so) you’ll have a lot of code crammed into a single UIViewController. This is intentional: the tutorials are largely self-contained, and only create classes and objects where OpenGL itself […]
Recap: Texturing in OpenGL can be achieved in two separate ways, using different API’s and hardware features. The preferred, modern approach – procedural texturing – uses nothing more than a Fragment shader (this is really what Fragment shaders were created for: Texturing). Part 5 (Textures: 1 of 3) covered that […]
This is a post for every iPhone/iPad developer. Every day, we try to use “best practices” when writing code, and building apps.
OpenGL Texturing has been re-invented multiple times, with different hardware implementations each time. As a developer, you need to be comfortable with all of them.
Apple invented “bundles” and “frameworks” to greatly improve the ease of development and maintenance of OS X projects. They are really good. But Apple modified Xcode to try and stop people using these on iOS. I don’t know why. Today I delved into this to find out the correct, working, […]
(this is a post mainly to document some new features and fixes I’ve added to SVGKit version 1.2 today – they are already on the main development branch (currently: 1.x), ready for use) SVGKit overview, November 2013 While a group of us were cleaning up and improving SVGKit about 2 […]
Recap: Part 1 – Overview of GLKit Part 2 – Drawcalls, and how OpenGL code is architected Part 3 – Vertices, Shaders and Geometry Part 4 – (additions to Part 3); preparing for Textures …but looking back, I’m really unhappy with Part 4. Xcode5 invalidates almost 30% of it, and […]
UPDATE: This post sucks; it has some useful bits about setting up a breakpoint in the Xcode debugger – but apart from that: I recommend skipping it and going straight to Part 4b instead, which explains things much better. This is Part 4, and explains how to debug in OpenGL, […]
I’m writing some KISS tutorials on using OpenGL ES 2.0 in iOS/mobile, because I was frustrated that most of the tutorials on GL ES used incorrect or outdated approaches. (I’m using the OpenGL ES 2.0 Programming Guide as my baseline, along with my own experiences of game-programming, and checking it […]
(this is Part 3; Part 1 has an index of all the posts) We finished Part 2 with the most basic drawing of all: we filled the screen with a background colour (pink/magenta), but no 3D objects.
UPDATED 24/09/13: Added some essential details to the class files at end of post, and corrected typos UPDATED 24/09/13: Added Github project with full source from this article This is Part 2. Part 1 was an overview of where Apple’s GLKit helps with OpenGL ES setup and rendering. I’ve been […]
Apple uses OpenGL extensively – their 2D desktop libraries (Quartz, CoreAnimation) are OpenGL-based, and iOS has inherited that link (along with some funky tricks you can pull). December 2013: I’ve converted the sample code from these articles into a standalone library on GitHub, with the article-code as a Demo app. […]
I’ve just posted some screenshots + notes for Reddit’s Screenshot Saturday, for the iPad game I’ve been working on for almost 2 years now. Doesn’t look like much given how long it’s been in development :(, but I’m hoping it’ll speed up from here! [homepage for the game] Along the […]
iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) are powered by 3D chips branded “PowerVR” from a company branded as “Imagination”. If you want to develop 3D games/apps, you can do that using Apple’s free tools + SDK. But some of the good stuff – e.g. higher-res textures – you’ll need to […]
I never imagined I’d reach anything even close to 10k rep. Lots of thoughts and some analysis to come on this in a future post – but I’ve got two deadlines coming up, so very rushed right now.
…and the last working version of Parse.com’s SDK isn’t listed on their website any more. So … if you see this (which you probably will, on any non-trivial project): Undefined symbols for architecture i386: “_FBTokenInformationExpirationDateKey”, referenced from: …then you MUST download and install the Facebook API into your iOS / […]