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++++
+title = "Game Progress Log - Six Months"
+date = 2025-04-18
++++
+
+{% important() %}
+This is more of a personal progress log than a blog post.
+I wrote it more for my future self than anyone else, though you're obviously welcome to read it if you want.
+{% end %}
+
+
+## Background
+Despite what I sometimes like to pretend, I'm not really a game dev. 
+I've created and deleted my fair share of Godot and Unity projects, I've messed around with [libGDX](https://libgdx.com/), I've completed three game jams (with varying degrees of success)
+but I've never actually made anything I'd consider *finished*. 
+I'm great at starting projects but terrible at completing them.
+
+A little over a year ago, I tried following the [learnopengl](https://learnopengl.com/) tutorials, and had a lot of fun doing so.
+I got as far as a pig in a spotlight before bad design decisions and my inexperience with C++ caused the project to collapse under its own weight.
+
+*Maybe in retrospect trying to learn graphics programming and C++ at the same time was not the best idea*...
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/pig.png", alt="Minecraft pig model drawn in front of a space-themed skybox", caption="piiiiiiiggggg") }}
+
+Fast-forward to 8 or so months ago, and I finally thought up a game idea I thought was worth persuing.
+Something I could stay motivated to work on in the longer-term, and hopefully stick with long enough to complete.
+
+I really want to love [Godot](https://godotengine.org/).
+It's my go-to choice for game jams, but once a project hits a certain size I can't figure out how to structure it.
+And I guess I just sort of got bored, or something. 
+I made a little prototype, ran into some weird Godot limitation I no longer remember, and thought "hmm, what if I did this myself."
+
+## Stuff
+So, for the last six months I've been working on a little game framework thingy in my free time.
+
+[SDL3](https://libsdl.org)+[Kotlin](https://kotlinlang.org) is a bit of a cursed combination,
+but Kotlin is my current favorite language and I wasn't going to repeat the mistake of using a language I'm not comfortable with. 
+
+When I started, [LWJGL](https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3) didn't have bindings for SDL (though [it does now](https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/pull/1033)) so it wasn't an option.
+[jextract](https://github.com/openjdk/jextract) works well enough for my purposes, since I was going to wrap most things in Kotlin anyway.
+
+The first triangle was fairly straightforward.
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/triangle.png", alt="A window displaying a rainbow triangle", caption="hello triangle") }}
+
+And I guess it just spiraled out of control from there. Instead of making a game I've been making a game framework.
+
+I find the SDL GPU API (~~wow that's a lot of caps~~) to be a lot easier to reason about than OpenGL was.
+Trying to learn OpenGL was difficult because everything was State Soup and some totally unrelated code somewhere else 
+would interfere with whatever I was trying to do, because I wasn't being careful enough.
+
+At least with SDL I have some idea what's actually going on.
+
+{% note() %}
+The lack of tutorials for SDL GPU was a little bit frustrating.
+Being extremely new, there's not much to go off other than [some examples](https://github.com/TheSpydog/SDL_gpu_examples/blob/main/Examples/ComputeSpriteBatch.c#L305)
+and the (actually fairly decent) [documentation](https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU).
+
+Also, [RenderDoc](https://renderdoc.org/) my beloved...
+{% end %}
+
+So let's see, after 6 months what have I got...
+
+### Sprite Batching
+Most everything is based around a compute-shader based sprite batcher. 
+It was loosely inspired by [this example](https://github.com/TheSpydog/SDL_gpu_examples/blob/main/Examples/ComputeSpriteBatch.c#L305).
+I don't have a great way to benchmark performance, but it handles tens of thousands of sprites with no problem on my laptop, 
+so it's more than fast enough.
+
+It does have the annoying limitation that all sprites must come from the same atlas texture, and it won't automatically batch sprites from a bunch of different ones.
+I should probably change that at some point.
+
+### Box2D
+I didn't really want to write my own physics. 
+Thanks to [Box2D](https://box2d.org/) 3.0+ being a C library, it was pretty easy to generate bindings for it.
+
+Unfortunately there's now a `conversions.kt` file that looks like
+```kotlin
+internal fun AABB.b2AABB(arena: Arena): MemorySegment {
+	val a = b2AABB.allocate(arena)
+	b2AABB.lowerBound(a, this.min.b2Vec2(arena))
+	b2AABB.upperBound(a, this.max.b2Vec2(arena))
+	return a
+}
+```
+just to convert to and from Box2D's types, but eh, it's fine. 
+I wrapped the callbacks with my own event system and it seems to be working well.
+
+### Lighting Experiments
+I am *very* new to graphics programming, all things considered, and trying to implement [radiance cascades](https://radiance-cascades.com/) was probably ill-advised.
+
+I did get some cool screenshots before I realized my game wouldn't even benefit from this kind of lighting in the first place.
+I probably could have figured it out if I'd spent a little more time, but I was getting bored.
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/idk.png", alt="Very broken scene", caption="yeah I don't even know lmao") }}
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/brokenrc.png", alt="Very broken scene", caption="significantly closer") }}
+
+{% note() %}
+It wasn't helped by the fact that my test scene was almost entirely text and thin debug lines left over from messing with Box2D.
+Even a correct RC implementation would probably struggle with that.
+{% end %}
+
+I might revisit this later. We'll see.
+
+### 3D Experiments
+After so much 2D stuff I was getting a bit bored. 
+My game is 2D, and there's no way I'll be writing a competent 3D engine, but I wanted to mess around a little. 
+If I could draw the pig with OpenGL, maybe I could do something similar with what I'd built.
+
+It went... about as well as could be expected.
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/brokenfox.png", alt="A fox with extremely broken textures", caption="biblically accurate fox or something idk") }}
+
+I did eventually unbreak the fox and get a cubemap skybox mostly working.
+
+It was pretty fun overall, even if not *useful*. 
+I learned about [gamma correction](https://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should-know-about-gamma/) 
+and some [neat tricks](https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/13/vulkan-tutorial-on-rendering-a-fullscreen-quad-without-buffers/) for fullscreen render passes, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.
+
+
+### Audio
+I initially tried plugging an opus decoder more or less directly into an `SDL_AudioStream`, but it turns out that was a bad idea.
+So for now, I'm using [miniaudio](https://miniaud.io/).
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/audio.png", alt="debug ui for audio, with volume, pitch, and pan options", caption="little sound ui thing I made with Dear ImGui") }}
+
+It supports basically everything I want to do anyway, like audio streaming, looping, pitch and pan modification, and more.
+
+Getting it to compile was bit of a headache because it's not designed to be built as a shared library, but I don't exactly have any other option to use it from Kotlin. 
+CMake makes me go insane...
+
+{% note() %}
+I've been using stuff from [the FTL soundtrack](https://benprunty.bandcamp.com/album/ftl) and [ESCISM](https://radicaldreamland.bandcamp.com/album/escism-esc-original-soundtrack) 
+as test tracks, which are therefore forever burned into my head. There are worse problems to have.
+{% end %}
+
+### User Interface
+I know basically nothing about UI, and trying to research how other people handle it proved kind of useless.
+
+"Just draw a bunch of textured rectangles! It's easy!"
+Yeah, okay, but where and what and why and aaaaaaaaa I don't even know.
+I was almost tempted to try to use [Dear ImGui](https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) for game UI, but the lack of theming made that impractical.
+
+I figured drawing [9-slices](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-slice_scaling) would be a good place to start, using the sprite batch code I'd written earlier.
+
+{{ image(src="/assets/6months/brokenui.png", alt="Extremely broken 9-slice drawing", caption="Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa") }}
+
+I decided to try to decouple the layout and the functionality a little, keeping the logic in Kotlin and the layout in [HOCON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON#HOCON). 
+
+Why HOCON? I don't know. The syntax is nice and [Hoplite](https://github.com/sksamuel/hoplite) provides nice error messages when I mess something up.
+
+It looks like this:
+```js
+{
+    // some stuff (theme declarations, etc.) omitted for brevity
+    rootElement = {
+        type: PaddingContainer
+        padding: {
+            left = 30f
+            right = 30f
+            top = 20f
+            bottom = 20f
+        }
+        child = {
+            type: HorizontalListContainer
+            children = [
+                {
+                    type: SizeConstraintContainer
+                    max_width = 100f,
+                    max_height = 100f,
+                    child = {
+                        type: NinePatchContainer
+                        id: "test-button-1"
+                        child = {
+                            type: Label
+                            font_size = 48f
+                            text = "1"
+                        }
+                    }
+                },
+                {
+                    type: SizeConstraintContainer
+                    max_width = 100f,
+                    max_height = 100f,
+                    child = {
+                        type: NinePatchContainer
+                        id: "test-button-2"
+                        child = {
+                            type: Label
+                            font_size = 48f
+                            text = "2"
+                        }
+                    }
+                }
+            ]
+        }
+    }
+}
+```
+
+There are lots of other container types like `AlignmentContainer`, `ClippingContainer` and I'll probably need to add a few more,
+like `ScrollContainer`.
+
+The Kotlin side looks like this, where the `ButtonBehavior` handles mouse presses and the hovered/pressed/released state.
+```kotlin
+val gui = Gui(Game.colorTarget, Core.gameDir.resolve("assets/test_ui.conf")).apply {
+	addBehavior(getElementById("test-button-1"), ButtonBehavior().also {
+		it.onMousePress += {
+			println("Button 1!")
+		}
+	})
+
+	addBehavior(getElementById("test-button-2"), ButtonBehavior().also {
+		it.onMousePress += {
+			println("Button 2!")
+		}
+	})
+	show()
+}
+```
+
+I don't think this will scale particularly well, but my game is fairly UI-light so it should be Fineeee™ for now at least.
+It's significantly better than just spamming `Batch.draw()` a bunch.
+
+I don't know how I'm going to handle more complex UI elements, like scroll bars and tab groups. HOCON makes it easy to include 
+other files with `include required(file("/path/to/thing.conf"))` so maybe I could try to make some templates for things like that.
+
+One of the hardest parts was dealing with `Batch`'s aforementioned everything-must-be-from-the-same-texture limitation.
+For now, I'm just generating a separate texture atlas for each UI at runtime, which doesn't feel great.
+
+Text is handled through [SDL_ttf](https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL_ttf)'s GPU text engine, which does most of the hard work with FreeType and HarfBuzz for me.
+All I have to do is keep track of different font styles.
+I tried using FreeType directly, and just about went insane on the spot.
+Text rendering [is not a rabbit hole I want to go down](https://faultlore.com/blah/text-hates-you/), and this is probably good enough
+for everything I'll want to do. 
+
+### Shader Hot-Reloading
+There's not much to say about it, other than that it works!
+It took too long to get the file watching working properly because Java's `WatchService` is a little weird.
+
+In the future I want to be able to hot-reload textures, though that's a little harder because the texture atlases would have to be rebuilt.
+
+### Misc
+There are some other things that I worked on that aren't really worth their own sections, like:
+- An overcomplicated asset management system
+- Remappable keybind handling
+- Most of a [glm](https://github.com/g-truc/glm)-esque math library from scratch
+
+## The Future
+This is now my biggest project ever in terms of LoC, which is ...concerning? ...fun?  I don't know. Let's go with [fun](https://dwarffortresswiki.org/Fun&redirect=no).
+
+I'm sure any professional engine devs are... what's the equivalent of "rolling in their graves" for people who are still alive? 
+Whatever. That. They're probably doing that.
+I don't really know what I'm doing, and I guarantee there are a bunch of horrible design decisions that will come back to bite me later.
+To be honest though, I don't really care. I'm having fun and learning a lot, which is what I set out to do.
+
+Once I get a little further along, I want to make the core framework open-source. 
+Not because I think anyone should use it, (please no, spare yourself) but because I wouldn't have gotten nearly this far without all the example code on the internet,
+and if my project can be of any help as a reference for someone else, I'd like that.
+
+I've experimented with adding the [Fleks](https://github.com/Quillraven/Fleks) ecs (not to be confused with [flecs](https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs)) and I've been very happy with the results so far.
+It seems like a good way to structure the game itself, though I'm not quite sure how to cleanly tie Box2D's physics in.
+
+Here's some things I might work on soon:™
+- Shader caching? (probably not necessary, but might be fun to do)
+- Getting it running on Windows (90% done already, shouldn't be too hard)
+- Basic [i18n](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization) maybe
+- Despaghettify the UI code
+- Figure out a name for this mess (I'm terrible at naming things)
+- **Start working on the actual game!**
+
+That last one is the main thing. It's about time I stop messing around and start actually making my game.
+If I want to make the core framework better, I have to try using it, and see what walls I run into.
+I'm sure there will be plenty.
+
+Anyway, that's it for now, see you in another six months!
\ No newline at end of file
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 Other changes:
 - Added the [random stuff page](/stuff).
 - Added some 88x31s to the home page, because why not?
-- Fixed the code block font and some other small things.\
+- Fixed the code block font and some other small things.
 - The [RSS (well, atom) feed](/blog/atom.xml) should finally work now.
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