Oh Noes! GLKit

Post date: Dec 9, 2011 1:43:59 PM

So far Train Defense has been developed on the PC using my old Magelore engine (which is cross platform for iOS and PC). I have enough going now I'd like to see how it operates on the iPad2, make sure the polycounts are reasonable and there camera angles look ok... However, to my horror, my old framework is somewhat deprecated now and the iOS GL Wizard now creates a shader driven GLKit framewark. Argh..

So I have 3 choices...

1. Try and work out how to create a universal app that is compatible with the old framework, which, btw, is using the openGL fixed shader pipeline.

2. Convert my engine to use shaders and VBOs.

3. Switch the engine over to GLKit.

I quite like shaders, so I am more than happy to ditch the old fixed pipeline code and start using shaders. I've recently written a GL engine for my dayjob simulation work and thats all shaders, so its nothing new to me.

As nice as GLKit looks, it still feels like an unneeded layer to me, one that would make my iOS game run with a lot of different code to my PC version.

So I'm going with option 2 and knocking up a shader pipeline for my engine. It's reasonably enjoyable work, though I'm pretty disappointed that this will slow down TrainDefense by another few days. I envisage most of the work will not be getting the shader pipeline going, but switching over all the old render code to use it...

Well, better get on with it.