Title: Single Player Pong
Author: Adrian Biagioli
Design Document: Single Player Pong
Screen Shot:
Difficulties Encountered:
I mentioned in my design doc that "Care must be taken so that objects do not spawn in between the ball and paddle (thus making them impossible to avoid)". I'm having trouble figuring this out in an elegant way, so for now I have not implemented bombs (bombs would previously end the game) to reduce frustration.
Good Code:
I'm proud of the work that I did on the geometry of this game; there were a few tricky edge cases and different things I needed to try to get the sphere / rectangle collision detection working. I ended up reducing the problem to ray/ray intersection (i.e., colliding the movement vector of the ball with the line comprising the paddle). This problem was especially difficult because the paddle can be rotated.
Before you dive into the code, it helps to understand the overall structure of this repository.
- Files you should read and/or edit:
main.cpp
creates the game window and contains the main loop. You should read through this file to understand what it's doing, but you shouldn't need to change things (other than window title and size).Game.*pp
declaration+definition for the Game struct. These files will contain the bulk of your code changes.meshes/export-meshes.py
exports meshes from a .blend file into a format usable by our game runtime. You will need to edit this file to add vertex color export code.Jamfile
responsible for telling FTJam how to build the project. If you add any additional .cpp files or want to change the name of your runtime executable you will need to modify this..gitignore
ignores theobjs/
directory and the generated executable file. You will need to change it if your executable name changes. (If you find yourself changing it to ignore, e.g., your editor's swap files you should probably, instead be investigating making this change in the global git configuration.)
- Files you probably should at least glance at because they are useful:
read_chunk.hpp
contains a function that reads a vector of structures prefixed by a magic number. It's surprising how many simple file formats you can create that only require such a function to access.data_path.*pp
contains a helper function that allows you to specify paths relative to the executable (instead of the current working directory). Very useful when loading assets.gl_errors.hpp
contains a function that checks for opengl error conditions. Also, the helpful macroGL_ERRORS()
which callsgl_errors()
with the current file and line number.
- Files you probably don't need to read or edit:
GL.hpp
includes OpenGL prototypes without the namespace pollution of (e.g.) SDL's OpenGL header. It makes use ofglcorearb.h
andgl_shims.*pp
to make this happen.make-gl-shims.py
does what it says on the tin. Included in case you are curious. You won't need to run it.
In order to generate the dist/meshes.blob
file, tell blender to execute the meshes/export-meshes.py
script:
blender --background --python meshes/export-meshes.py -- meshes/meshes.blend dist/meshes.blob
There is a Makefile in the meshes
directory that will do this for you.
The runtime code has been set up to be built with FT Jam.
For more information on Jam, see the Jam Documentation page at Perforce, which includes both reference documentation and a getting started guide.
On unixish OSs, Jam is available from your package manager:
brew install ftjam #on OSX
apt get ftjam #on Debian-ish Linux
On Windows, you can get a binary from sourceforge,
and put it somewhere in your %PATH%
.
(Possibly: also set the JAM_TOOLSET
variable to VISUALC
.)
This code uses the libSDL library to create an OpenGL context, and the glm library for OpenGL-friendly matrix/vector types. On MacOS and Linux, the code should work out-of-the-box if if you have these installed through your package manager.
If you are compiling on Windows or don't want to install these libraries globally there are pre-built library packages available in the kit-libs-linux, kit-libs-osx, and kit-libs-win repositories. Simply clone into a subfolder and the build should work.
Open a terminal (or x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2017
on Windows), change to the directory containing this code, and type:
jam
That's it. You can use jam -jN
to run N
parallel jobs if you'd like; jam -q
to instruct jam to quit after the first error; jam -dx
to show commands being executed; or jam main.o
to build a specific file (in this case, main.cpp). jam -h
will print help on additional options.