Opeth wins, still having sphere trouble

Opeth‘s newest album is Watershed, and I just got the opportunity to listen to it.  This thing is incredible, definitely Opeth‘s most ambitious and heavy album yet.  It has a lot more stuff in it that seems to be in metal’s more extreme sub-genres, and yet touches on music which is even more beautiful than any purely acoustic or otherwise soft things they’ve done.  There are parts that even reflect elements of jazz and psychedelic rock.  This album is pure poetry.  I highly recommend it.

And back in apple dancer land, the insane asylum where my happy goat lives, I’m still having trouble with the whole great circles sphere tessellation thing.  I refuse to fall back on lattitude and longitude circles because I’m an efficiency whore.  I’ll get this thing.

floculate continued, freetype blues

So, I’m still working on the codebase for this Floculate game.  Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Wrote a new video code base.  It has one API in a header file, and it compiles a different C file depending on the platform you’re compiling on.  This is done by having system.c include either system.linux.c or system.win32.c depending on platform defines.  system.win32.c is empty right now, because I’m still working on the GNU/Linux platform.  When I finish the platform specifics and rendering fundementals I’ll do the Win32 version.
• Took the physics engine source dir and copied it over to the Floculate source dir, and then did a make reference to the rat_physics makefile of choice, followed by copying a temp file of librat_physics_double.a.  Double is the precision of the real type it’s compiled with.

Here’s what I’m working on now… freetype font rendering in OpenGL.  I want to make my own font engine so that it’s in C and only as big as it has to be.  Problem is, I have no idea where to start.  I know what I want to do, and how to do the second part.  Basically it goes like this:

1. Use FreeType to render the desired glyphs to pixmap surfaces.
2. Create a texture and metric datum for each glyph.
3. Display them as textured quads given text input / special effects.

So I can create textures from pixmaps and display them as textured quads.  What I DON’T know how to do is render the font.  If anyone out there has some advice, please come forward.  And please, don’t be all ‘hurr hurr use a redy madee font engin.’  I don’t want to.  But if someone knows of a good example of using freetype to render to pixmaps, then making textures from that, great.  I’ll keep posting on this until we’re all resolved.

On a random tangent: listen to Under The Weeping Moon.  It’s an awesome song.