Coding adventures of a geek

I was recently considering implementing simple animation system with a vertex shader, when I remembered just what a pain debugging shaders can be… Implementing some kind of shader output can be difficult to do, time consuming and odds on you’ll be testing in a way that means the shader isn’t actually being used as it…

For most models things are kept simple, just one material with a texture, job done – lets get this out the door! however especially if you want a good looking low poly style, then just one material just doesn’t cut it. Take a look at an example model from the highly recommended kenney.nl The first…

As raylib is intended for novice programmers (but more than useful enough for advanced users) it’s important not to make assumptions about the end users understanding of the finer points of rendering. With this in mind lets look at just what a “billboard” is. Billboards are fast, even a low poly tree (for example) could…

The simple way to do some kind of parallax scrolling background, is simply to render in 2D a number of textures (scrolling at different speeds) usually with transparent (alpha) areas. However mix in a more complex scenario with particles and its time to leverage the power of the GPU to sort things by depth. This…

Believe it or not we’re not a million miles away from a functioning game! By using the players isWalkable function, we can push crates around when its appropriate. But first we need to set up our crates. What’s happening here isn’t too complex – we’re taking the map template for the new level and looking…

Python has some nice tools to enable to load and save objects, in particular to a json file. and we have all our levels loaded. In this case its a grid of cells, each cell potentially holding 3 layers. The bottom layer is for walkable tiles and crate targets – this puzzle game has us…

Looking closer at raylib’s 2d capabilities let get some stuff set up A small “Enum” class allows us to create a simple state machine this will help up keep track of what is happening with our player character. cutting the “sprites” that I want out of an image, if fairly straight forward Notice that once…

Last time we looked at a minimal example to provide a window displaying 2d text… Before more fully exploring raylib’s 2D capabilities, we’re going to have a quick look at a minimal 3d example! Lets just look at the new bits…. Using the ffi module we can create a camera structure, now you guessed it…

When I was looking around for an environment to teach programming, I thought wouldn’t it be great if I could teach with raylib, however as much as I like C for all sorts of reasons, it can be a little daunting at first, especially if for example you’ve only coded with scratch before. Enter python…