Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Let's just say that I want to create text file with 3d coordinates of an object (cube or sphere), and my software renderer shoould read this file and display it on the screen. And I can zoom in/out, change coordinates of vertecies with a mouse, rotate and move it. This cube can be wired or colored and if it wired I want to see which edges are visible and which are not. And to render this cube I want to use only setpixel/drawline functions from win api or sdl. Thanks for the links.


That sounds like a fun challenge. If you're constraining yourself to use as few libraries as possible, I'd go with OBJ [1] for the 3d mesh and PPM [2] for writing images. It's easy to implement a bare bones reader/writer and some OSes (like macOS) can show them in the file browser. Raytracing in One Weekend goes over PPM. There are a bunch of header-only libraries that handle different file formats like stb_image [3]. I usually end up using those when I start dealing with textures or UI elements. I don't use Windows so I haven't used their APIs for projects like this. I'd usually go for imgui or SDL (like you mentioned). tinyracaster, a sibling project of tinyrenderer, touches on those [4]. I liked LazyFoo's SDL tutorial [5]. Good luck!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm#PPM_example

[3] https://github.com/nothings/stb

[4] https://github.com/ssloy/tinyraycaster/wiki/Part-4:-SDL

[5] https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/index.php


Yeah, I know about ppm but I didn't know about .obj files. That's great. And sdl is a good crossplatform choice because linux doesn't have similar to win api GDI. Thanks for the links.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: