i’ve had a weekend of getting my head around the basics behind OpenGL; my programming language of choice, the rather spiffy Blitz Max, is essentially a 2D language (which was one of the main reasons i leant towards it in the first place, having previously used Blitz BASIC 2D to the point i was trying to simulate some of the more rudimentary lighting effects that Max can handle by rendering objects manually) but there is support included for rendering with OpenGL and, theoretically at least, that means i could build a 2.5D shooter of some kind. So far i’ve managed to position, plot, scale and rotate some vertexes and then some low poly shapes, although i suspect that a lot of my code so far is somewhat fudged…

As to what i’ll actually do with this test code i haven’t decided yet, but the idea of stylised, untextured shoot ‘em up is rather appealing right now and, assuming the theme doesn’t preclude it in some way, might be my “look” for the next ShmupDev rapid prototyping session since i really enjoyed the last one and the next one starts on Monday. Certainly one of my thrown together test objects will look quite good tumbling onto screen, disgorging some bullets and then spinning away again (or being blown to smithereens – that does raise a question of how to blow up a 3D object but i’ve just had a thought as i was writing this so i’ll have to give that a little more consideration) and with a bit of modification will make the basis for a nice player ship as well. Strapping the Alien Release Scheduling Engine into this environment should prove quite… interesting though, the co-ordinates are based on 0,0 (thinking in two dimensions and ignoring Z) being the centre of the play area!