November 21: For our final project, we are to create a simple space racing game in Java with OpenGL. This is suppose to bring together all of the skills that we have learned over the semester. It will have a space ship, a star field sky box, and numerous asteroids. I'm actually very excited about this project, because I've enjoyed the class so far and I think it will be a good exercise. Let's hope it goes well.
There has to be a heads-up display (HUD) for a perspective that is suppose to be from inside the ship's cockpit. In an earlier project, I made a HUD that was pretty simple. It just showed a fake mini-map and text representing the camera's current position. I think this will be very similar, except with more detail. I think we will attempt to represent the inside of the ship using some textures found online.
November 22: The ship is coming along slowly. I originally planned on using Blender like I have before for some of my other projects, but I haven't used it in a while and ultimately I would have the same issue of trying to parse an .obj file into workable OpenGL triangles. So for now I'm doing it the hardest way possible. I've drawn a simple ship in AutoCAD and slowly been extracting the vertices of each triangle. I feel like doing it this way will give me better control, but more time used up. The red lines are the triangles that I've already copied over and have being rendered in OpenGL. I usually bring the vertices in one set at a time to make sure everything is working fine. One note that I've found; my OpenGL world is currently in the Y+ is up, while in AutoCAD, Z+ is up. Not a huge issue since it's space, but still.