Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

I just merged in my changes to update Pioneer to use OpenGL 3.2 on Windows/Linux/OSX and since I haven’t posted about anything in a while now seemed like a good time to describe those changes, and why I’ve made them.

Pioneer has been using OpenGL 2 for many years now, it even supported the fixed–function–pipeline until not long ago and it’s rendering system has stopped Pioneer from being ported to run on mobile class devices which typically use OpenGL ES. It used methods that have become deprecated including the matrix stacks, built-in lighting and texture coordinate structures and had several performance sapping calls to glGet* functions.

Over time I have removed all of the glGet* function calls, which improved performance and consistency but put off the really big rewrite to refactor everything to use our own matrix stacks, lighting and texturing for a long time. Eventually the lure of modern Vertex Array Objects tempted me and I bit, sadly this broke the OSX version of the game and I didn’t even notice for a few weeks.

This was the straw that broke the camels back. I knew that OpenGL 3.2 would work on OSX/Linux and Windows for most people from experiments/rewrites I had done, but struggling along with all of the old crud and extensions was taking up a lot of time and making it almost impossible to progress.

Perhaps a better coder could have found the magic combination of incantations required to make everything work across of them and retain the OpenGL 2.x setup we had but I am only human so that Sisyphean task could go and kiss my ass.

There will be no talk of the “future” in this post since I’ve learnt my lesson that discussing it just means it gets sidetracked and won’t happen within anything like the timeframe I thought it would. Of course these changes means that there will be bugs, there will be performance issues and opportunities, there will be features that people will magically want adding in zero time ;) and so on and so forth. We’ll just have to deal with them as they occur.

NB: I have removed the links to the older 2.x compatible executables as they were removed from the download page at some point.

Andy