Assignment2

Honestly, I didn’t really understand the purpose of this assignment at first, or until I took the third lecture. Part of the reason is because that I’m not familiar with neither OpenGL nor DirectX. Since I didn’t know what’s bind really mean I just simply move some of the global function (I don’t know how to call it) to a different file. Later in the class, I understood that purpose to do like this is because we want to have different geometry objects ( I though we just need to through vertices in to one pipeline, and we don’t really have to care about that) and that’s why we want to have a class for it. I didn’t do that in this assignment, I’m lazy to do so, so I will do it for next assignment. ( I think I still meet the requirements)

 

The difficulty I had was mostly due to the terminologies and knowledge about graphics. I had hard time understand what effects mean in a code. Because of that, I took most of time try and error for moving codes and see which part is movable and which part is unmovable.

 

By proceeding this assignment, I had a conversation with my college about whether we should have a flexible system to detect that triangles are in right hand system or left hand system in order to be visible on the screen. Later in the class, JP told us that because the part of code we are touching will be a pipeline system of the game engine, we should stick with a convention we will decide and shouldn’t care about that issue.

Addition to that I didn’t realize that the requirement was saying s3dObjectGeometry shouldn’t contain platform specific code, and I did that to my s3dObjectGeometry header file. But I guess the part of the code which is platform specific is only the part where detecting the order of vertices by detecting whether it should be right hand system or left hand system to be visible, which I just explained above. And based on what JP says it will be deleted later. So hopefully JP wouldn’t take a point from me.

 

Since there is a viewport initialization for Direct X, I think the remaining differences between Graphics.d3d.cpp and Graphics.gl.cpp is that way those api initialize viewport.