I was wrapping up my CS degree when I took my last non-mandatory course: Computer Graphics. This course covered all elements needed to properly develop 3D software using techniques like texture mapping, lighting methods, ray tracing, quaternion and matrix calculations, and GPU programming using OpenGL and GLSL. But the most important thing this course did was that it simply got me to set up tools running on my machines so that I could start exploring these techniques independently.

With my graduation close at hand I decided to focus on the Ubisoft competition that I had heard about as a member of the UofT game developers club. The competition guidelines stated that I could not use external libraries such as FreeGlut or GLEW however, I did not need all functionalities of GLEW to run a sufficient 3d engine so I built my own OpenGL utility library called GLTape. At this point, I was still within the competition rules and I built my engine understanding seeing as gl.h is an internal library.

All of my plans were thrown into disarray on the morning of the competition when it was announced that we weren't permitted to use any OpenGL functions, even ones included in internal libraries. I had sufficiently developed my math utilities library so I decided to build my own 3d render pipeline and use the line drawing function the competition provided to draw the outlines of the spherical bodies. Unfortunately, I was not able to make the pipeline work in the 20 hours I allocated from my 40 total hours and missed the deadline. My mistake was that I overscoped in attempting to develop a perspective projection matrix and I struggled far too long on skewing my circles when I should have just pivoted to an orthographic projection.

Ultimately I’m really proud of my component-based architecture. There were still several rough edges from being developed in a competition context that needed to be smoothed out. And I’ve had a fun time getting this project to a place where I can show off my engine development aptitude. This current build is about as far as I plan on taking this engine as I plan to rebuild the engine using Vulkan as this will better prepare me for industry practices.