Sunday, August 31, 2008

Fullscreen GL ...

Programming games is fun. Games typically run in fullscreen mode, so in today's world, it's important to have a portable way of setting a full screen mode. It looks like this is more of a hassle than you'd think it is.

I'm fond of SDL because it's quite a powerful library. There is a SDL_WM_ToggleFullScreen function that lets you switch between full screen and windowed mode. I noticed however, that on the Mac, the full screen mode of SDL would actually resize the application window to maximum size rather than take up the whole screen. The problem is that the Apple menu bar remains visible on the top of the screen, and also the dock would still pop up when you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen.
In Windows, I found that it helps to resize the window to the maximum resolution before trying to toggle to full screen.
The man page of SDL_WM_ToggleFullscreen does say that toggling to full screen is not supported on all platforms.
To my astonishment, there is a rather simple fix for this, but first I'd like to tell you about the little adventure I had with GLUT.

Because of the full screen problem I had with SDL, I decided to switch to GLUT and try that out. GLUT is real easy to use, because it feels much more high-level than SDL and you quickly get results with little effort. GLUT features a so called 'GameMode' in which it switches to a full screen mode. While this seems to work across platforms, I'm having an incredibly pesky issue in that the screen is no longer being updated — all animations and movement appear frozen although the display function is being called. It's like glutSwapBuffers is not swapping buffers anymore or so?
Switch back to windowed mode, and everything works perfectly again. It's not the obvious beginners mistake of not re-initializing GL ... I don't know what it is, and I spent way too much time on trying to get this to work. Searching the web also doesn't turn up much information, other than people saying that GLUT is bugged and you should use SDL.
What's also really odd, is that GLUT allowed me to set a 10000x3000 video mode on my 1440x900 monitor. SDL doesn't let you do weird things like that.

Exit GLUT, it's nice for trying out a quick scene, but for anything larger, I'm through with it.
Getting back to SDL, it turns out to be amazingly simple to enter full screen mode. Forget about SDL_WM_ToggleFullScreen, as it's useless. Use SetVideoMode instead:
SetVideoMode(max_xres, max_yres, bpp, SDL_OPENGL | SDL_FULLSCREEN);
The maximum resolution can be obtained by using SDL_ListModes. You should
always use this, as a good program knows what video modes are supported and what modes are not.
You can switch back to windowed mode by omitting the SDL_FULLSCREEN flag, and mind to set the window size back to it's original size.
The beauty of all of this is that it appears to be portable, too. As to why anyone ever thought up a broken SDL_WM_ToggleFullScreen function, we'll probably never know.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Doomed to code

I read an interesting interview with John Carmack, lead programmer at id Software, famous (1) for creating the game DOOM. In the interview, he talked a little about his game engines with the cool sounding code names "Tech 4", "Tech 5", "Tech 6", etc. To my surprise, there were some very negative comments to this article, people complaining that Carmack is not doing anything innovative at all, as he is recreating the same old game over and again. He is obsessed with his engine and not creating fun games any more.

This made me realize that Carmack is, above all, a programmer, and he is making his code evolve. This is what technical programmers do and what they live for.
In the early 1990s he had a lot of success with his DOOM project, and all he wants is to impress people with a better, faster, cleaner, leaner, more technologically advanced version. Likewise, in the early 1990s, I had a lot of success (although never as much :-) by doing a lot of programming on a BBS (2) and I developed several iterations of this BBS. You wouldn't believe the amount of time spent thinking up new ways of doing the internals and tinkering with the code.
Not only is programming addictive, so is having success. Trying to recreate that past success can be a great driving force. Deep inside of me there may always be the wish to create a new implementation of the BBS. John Carmack has this dream too, and he's earning a living with it.

To my surprise, Carmack is not merely striving for visual perfection. He has recognized that today's popular gaming console (read: the XBox 360) contains 2 year old hardware and therefore needs simpler graphics (like, for instance, tricked shadows rather than compute intensive real shadowing effects) to get more performance.
Kiddies that are complaining that Carmack is only talking about performance, simply don't get it. The performance of the rendering engine is a very important aspect of a game.
The "60 Hz versus 30 Hz" debate is hyped, but not entirely unimportant; having a 60 Hz engine sounds more technologically advanced, however, it sounds to me that a 30 Hz engine would have tons more time per cycle left for doing other things, like AI. Good AI is what makes games fun to play.

One last thing he mentioned that raised my interest was what Carmack said about mega-textures, a technique developed by him that makes it possible to define the world in one giant unique texture, rather than to build the world from repeating textures.
The interesting thing is that he said "it is only two pages of code"; he is now talking casually about what was presented a year ago as his big new thing. Now that he's been working with it for many months, it's not that special to him any more. This behavior is typical for programmers (I do it all the time).
Funnily enough, a lot of cool code snippets are only one or two pages.
It is also a jab at other game developers; the mega-texture technique is apparently not that hard to implement and other knuckleheads should have been able to find out how by now, too.

John Carmack is still a hero in my book, even if id Software's games are not as shockingly groundbreaking as the original DOOM. It's not like the guy gathered fame for no reason at all, (Paris Hilton comes to mind ...) and as long as he keeps revealing technical details about the inner workings of his engines, he's got my attention.
As for the complaining kids out there ... it's just like what I always told the users of the BBS: anyone who dares complain should go and write their own. And one day, I even followed my own advice.


  1. Carmack is like a celebrity, lately doing more interviews than a movie star, and spending more time writing keynote presentations than writing code.
  2. BBS: Some kind of (now ancient) online service featuring a message board with forums, and interactive chat.