No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 050: More bugs, tech debt and loose ends

Streamed on 2024-09-17 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

OBS ate my recorded file, so I had to download the Twitch vod.

There were two items of technical debt that we addressed today. Generally, I consider tech debt to be items that I didn't like when I wrote them, but I used them to get over a hump on some other feature, knowing I had to come back later to fix/cleanup/improve.

The first was shader explicit uniform locations. I really like this feature, but early on I decided to limit myself to OpenGL 3.3 core and this meant I had to use an extension. At the time I just did it, but the extension violates my limit on versions. So I removed it today and replaced it with an array of locations that are looked up once and cached per shader program. Also, there are no string hash lookups to do so. This did require me to update my asset pipeline for shader code. I am pretty happy with what we ended up with, although the explicit uniform locations is definitely better. In game #2 on my roadmap I'll relax the self imposed OpenGL limitations and do more play in that area.

The second was screen space scaling. Up until now it was just copy/paste from one scene to another, and them some of the scale computations were using different reference sizes to scale up/down from. I put the basic computations in Renderer and refactored everything else to just use that. It gave me the opportunity to change some data types at the same time (int to double) where I was truncating positional/size information.