I want to make primitive graphics. Instead of textured polygons I want solid color polygons, and use lines for details. I have written an entirely software based 3D renderer in java that uses that approach based on a 3D graphics book from 1995. I have an array to represent all pixels on the screen and do all the processing on CPU side, then passes the array to openGL to render as a texture on a quad, creating a full screen 320 by 240 pixel resolution. You can see the results here:
It works, it even has a z buffer that handles transparency by depth sorting pixels, but it's slow. I think I can speed things up by doing it in the hardware with shaders and C++ ( not looking to debate java vs c++, but I am trying to get better at c++ so that what I feel like using ). My java project taught me a lot about the fixed function graphics pipeline as it existed in the early 1990s, but I can't wrap my head around shaders.
To make things worse, I'm trying to make a shader for bad graphics, and modern graphics programming all seems to emphasize textures, so I can't find a tutorial.
I will write my "models" directly in the code, with arrays to hold vertex, polygon, and color information. I will have to pass the color for each polygon to the shader, and I don't have a clue how to do that.
I also need to draw lines, and need a z buffer that does depth sorting so transparency looks good, but I can try to figure those out after I have the basic knowledge about drawing polygons.
If you have any experience or know about any tutorials I'd appreciate it. Or even a book, I still like crappy graphics and I still like books. My computer is probably using roman numerals for 1s and 0s.
