I've become obsessed with Day 09... The Rope Bridge.
After getting the answer right I wanted to see it. I initially wrote it in Odin, then for the visualization I wrote it again in Rust doing the WASM thing and animating it with Unicode emoji which was neat, but then I wanted to do more Odin.
So back to this place, back to this time, again and again...
What? Nevermind. I wanted to learn Raylib in Odin. It was easier, this time, at least in the beginning.
At the moment, my goal is a texture atlas for the instanced rendering which was the last thing I got working.
Until next time...
Specifically with Day 09 as the primary example...
$ odin run . -- day09
0001: I thought the "Player" wasn't being drawn, but it is! Not rotated how I expected... And smaller... The cubes I'm using for the "rope" are double the size of my "Player". At the moment you can move the camera around but I broke "Player" movement. If you want to watch the whole show you have to move the camera to follow the rope. I can draw something on ever new space links 1 and 9 touch, link 0 being the head, but the way I was doing it slows the whole thing down and then it crashes after a while. I could maybe draw and update a big texture, or several, underneath the rope... But what I want to achieve is instanced rendering. I got instanced rendering working in a Kotlin project a long time ago, but the codebase became such a mess and I couldn't seem to clean it up without breaking it. Since then, instanced rendering has been my white whale. Gotta get over that hurdle. And it needs to be readable and understandable. Kotlin let me get away with too much. I like the way Odin makes me feel, UwU. Until it segfaults and I don't know why.
0002: When you load a model it has a materials array attached to it. It appears that each Material needs to have a Shader attached to it. So THAT's how you use a shader! I've been going up and down this instanced rendering example in C (in which I'm not even sure what version of Raylib is being targeted), attempting to work backwards to identify the minimum requirements for accomplishing instanced rendering (in my spare time between depression's lethargy and work hence the slow progress), and I finally noticed that they were assigning the shader they had loaded to the material of the model. At this point I'm not sure what all is contained in a Material. I'll look into it one day. Next goal is to have each instance access it's own texture from an atlas, specifically so that locations touched only by link 1 have a different texture from those touched only by link 9, which is different from links touched by both.
0003: This last commit involved staying up too late when I have to be up early. That's the only way to get real work done. When you should not be doing what you're doing, you'll do your best work. 6 hours. I made a new cube in blender with the goal of being able to shift texture coordinates down by around 170px to get to the next texture in my roll-your-own atlas texture, and probably spent too long on that bc I didn't start with the code until I should have been in bed, I think. So, in the code, an array of floats was needed for per instance y offsets and luckily I had the information about each instance I needed already ready already with the DrawMe enum. Past me DID think about these things! The rest of the time was spent figuring out how to pass the data to the shader in a way that C understands. I'm finishing this entry days later so the details have become a bit muddy, but I had to use the rl.SetShaderValueV function to get my offsets loaded and by only several hours after bedtime I had tiny instanced squares in 3 colors! And that uses only half the atlas! I could add details to those cubes of I wanted to. Stupid, meaningless details for a "rope simulation" from Advent Of Code 2022, Day 09. I could... And I might...