The Derydoca Engine has been in development now for a little over a year and it has come a long way from rendering it's first colorful triangle. It now can render complex scenes, load many file formats, supports GLSL shaders, and even some simple particle systems! This has been a side project of mine that I work on in my spare time. Considering all of that, it has moved at a quick pace. One thing that has taken a back seat in this process was code quality and organization. If you have been following my blog, you will know there…

The day has finally come. I have completed the final chapter in OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook which explores mesh deformation and particle systems. It was definitely an interesting challenge and has given me the want to create a flexible particle system incorporating all of the things I have learned and more. As always, these examples were developed in my very own game engine (Derydoca Engine). If you want to follow along, the commit hash of the GitHub repository is 0ee6024b54cce60a7850b03f65b499833101200a. Vertex Displacement This exercise takes a mesh and distorts it in the Y direction to move the vertices in…

Procedural generation of content has become more and more commonplace in the game industry. You see it in triple-a titles, but it is most easily found in the indie game developer scene. Why is that? It's because you can leverage the strengths of a computer to generate content for you. This chapter of OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook digs into some ways you can use procedural perlin noise generation for generating interesting shaders. This book decided to stay away from generating these noise textures in the shaders themselves in favor of generating them on the CPU at start-up time and…

Finally here we are at chapter seven! I have been looking forward to implementing shadows in the Derydoca Engine for quite some time, and this is exactly what chapter seven of OpenGL 4.0 Shanding Language Cookbook focuses on. The chapter begins by implementing shadow maps with no filtering. That leaves you with extremely aliased shadows that leave a lot to be desired. Luckily the book quickly remedies that with examples of different filtering techniques to achieve a shadow effect that is more pleasing to the eyes. One of the challenges I had when implementing these features is that the book…

I just finished going through all of the examples of chapter 6 of OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook which introduces the geometry and tessellation shaders and some of the ways you can use it to your advantage. I have always been interested in geometry and tessellation shaders, so naturally I was excited I finally made it this far in the book. This chapter has given me plenty of ideas that I want to explore when I have some more time to play around with shaders. You may see some tutorials using some of these techniques in the near future. This…

I have torn through another chapter of GLSL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook and had a blast doing it. The third chapter guides you through creating six shaders building on other shader techniques introduced in the previous chapter. If you don't already own GLSL Shader Cookbook, I highly recommend it, but make sure to pick up the physical copy. I am using the Kindle version which creates a lot of issues with formatting of code that can drive a person mad. If you are already mad like me though, go ahead and pick up the digital copy so you can start…

I have been working through the book OpenGL 4.0 Shading Language Cookbook lately to implement all of the shaders and features into the Derydoca Engine. I recommend this book to anyone who is trying to get a handle on GLSL and how it works. I do have some gripes with the e-book version that I have through Kindle because the code is formatted horribly, but if you understand the basic syntax of GLSL you can work around those issues. If you are following along and want to see this in action, you will have to check out the branch 'features/shader-cookbook'…