GFX Adventures

this repo is a collection of how i'm learning graphics, straight into the deep end. i'm a bit of an aspiring technical artist at this point and Unity's ShaderLab has given me almost too much niceties I'm rebuilding here.. probably too much.

i'll probably stick to c++ the whole time. sorta tested cross platform but not really, 100% windows and mac, though.

this project is organized into chapters/branches, with master being the current chapter, synced to it's own branch.
this wasn't always the case though, so broken branches might exist.

building & running

Requirements

• premake5
• (linux/mac) - clang 7+ or gcc 8+, make
• (linux/mac) - glfw3, glew libs
• (mac) - macOS SDK Headers (if they are missing, read)
• (windows) - visual studio 2017

Windows

Visual Studio 2017

Run:

premake5 vs2017
.\GFXAdventures.sln

Click Run/Debug, Done.

VS2017 Developer Console

run.bat
# which is equivalent to
premake5 vs2017
msbuild
.\.bin\main.exe

*for VSCode, you can add this to workspace config to launch Dev Console in the integrated terminal

    "terminal.integrated.shell.windows": "C:\\Windows\\System32\\cmd.exe",
    "terminal.integrated.shellArgs.windows": [
        "/k", "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Visual Studio\\2017\\Community\\Common7\\Tools\\VsDevCmd.bat"
    ]

Full VSCode tooling is provided as well, please tweak to your liking.

Mac & Linux

Run:

./run.sh
# -- which is equivalent to --
premake5 gmake2
make -j
.bin/main

# -- alternative build configs --
env config=debug ./run.sh        # (the default) a very verbose debugging mode w/ symbols.
env config=debugshaders ./run.sh # to debug shader preprocessor/loader internals as well
env config=release ./run.sh      # for no debugging at all. possibly faster.

Done.

Full VSCode tooling is provided as well, please tweak to your liking.

todo

• render 2d stuff!
• render 3d stuff!
• engine framework-ish
• ???
• physics
• windows support/tooling
• premake5, because i was too lazy to install it
• fix weird malloc free break on exit.

stuff for way later

• OpenVR
• direct3d
• vulkan

some cool things

• #include directive in GLSL
• #pragma vertex/fragment/etc from ShaderLab

See shaders/triangle_combined.glsl for a full rundown.

chapters/diary

01 A Beginning

branch -- no windows support.

so this was just to get stuff on the screen. i started this on mac, opengl. even with a few quirks, namely that it won't render unless the window is bumped, it worked rather well. i wanted to try getting it running on windows, but c++17 STL and windows still don't really get along, and things didn't compile well for me. eventually rewrote it to no avail, and reverted. but thennn, i swapped to linux on a VM, and things worked out. my previous assumption that VS for C++ is fucking dumb is where my mind stands. even trying mingw, gcc, and clang on windows gave me trash. nothing to do.

editing a shader and pressing page up will reload them. press escape to exit.

02 Frameworks

branch -- no windows support.

so this is where i learned all about smart pointers, classes, and some other really dumb things about C++ that i was poisoned away from in C#/Go. eventually everything made sense, though, thanks to some friends. one of the same friends also introduced me to premake, which is the thing i've enjoyed most about this whole experience.

i worked quite a bit on the shader system, i think it's the most perfect system i could have devised for myself. even got into preprocessing a little, i might dig deeper into that in the future, I all too much enjoy Unity's ShaderLab/HLSL stuff.

i almost have full feature parity with 01, but i decided to take a detour to windows for 03, as all that's left is some weirdo shader things.

this one also lost me a lot of sleep, accidentally got too far down the pointer rabbit hole.

03 In a Window, Darkly.

branch

02's detour into making this system work on.. windows.. and some other detour-y things.

even though this seems like a simple task, it was kind of was. this was a complete mess of tooling issues, both my on my system and in my code. windows support wasn't difficult, as I already sorta realized what I needed to do for it... but i come back to my mac and find everything scuffed again. and regex, out of all things, had a massive bug. but the bug? it wasn't a bug at all. it was a linker problem. any atom (think .), in any form mind you (incl. \x00 and etc), would segfault on search. i spent maybe 2 hours going through things to realize this. turns out, if i compiled with mac's gcc alias (but it was actually clang but apple edition,) it would actually work. so that means my user mode clang's ld.lld was linking in a wild direction and either SIGSEGV or SIGBUS-ing any time that code ran. i removed my own alias and it started working. jfc.

04 Actual Graphics

branch

time for actually like.. doing opengl things. i guess.

made a rudimentary material system. need to improve it.