Game Development Diaries - 002

Well, after much work on getting WynterStorm running in Mac OS X, it works, and quite well at that. I decided to give up my crazy dream of building a Cocoa platform layer for the engine and just used SFML to get a window up and running and handle events. All the graphics output is handled by OpenGL though, so SFML is used in only one file, which is the Mac OS X specific port. I may give up SDL for the Windows and Linux ports and just use SFML as the core of the engine, but for now I'm just happy to have it successfully compiling and running in both Windows and OS X. If you notice the FPS counter in OpenGL Profiler, it peaked out around 950 FPS during that run. Using a custom FPS counter would likely show a higher FPS as it wouldn't rely on cpu intensive development tools to slow down the program but I don't feel like running the built-in profiler on the OpenGL code just yet. Yes, I said "built-in profiler", as in I have a set of classes already designed for measuring the application's performance, as any engine should, but I have other areas to work on before I focus on speed. The scripting part of the engine, for example, isn't currently working in the OS X build, because I haven't put in the time to build V8 on that platform. For now though, I am quite pleased with the results of the engine and how well it runs on both platforms.