It has been a month and a half since I gave you an update on the engine. I have been very busy implementing new features and fixing several bugs with the engine. Some of the new features are shown in the video below:
Improvements
One of the major features that I implemented in v0.0.4 is a particle system. To be honest, the particle system is very primitive. I am still learning how to create several particle effects, so expect more effects soon. As you can see from the video, I was able to implement a "kind of" explosion effect.
I also implemented collision filters. Collision filters are useful whenever you want a particular type of objects to collide with one another but not with any other kind. For example, object A and object B can collide; object A and object C can collide, but any collision between object B and object C is ignored.
A minor detail which I had ignored all along was to enable multi-touch in the engine.
Issues
While developing the second game demo, I started noticing glitches with the OpenGL manager. With a particular type of objects, the OpenGL manager would spit out an error. This issue was hard to detect, and it took me quite a few weeks to find it. I thought I had fixed the bug, but as I was developing this beta version, the OpenGL manager complained again (once). The problem with this bug is that it is intermittent and very hard to reproduce.
I'm considering porting the engine to work with the Apple Graphics API, Metal. However, I'm still weighing the pros and cons of using OpenGL vs. Metal. One thing I have noticed is that Metal is a lot easier to work with than OpenGL, but that is just my opinion.
Thanks for reading
