Q2Model, Part 7
The fun and exciting thing that figuring out the PCX file format allowed me to, was to wander through a large collection of models people had created.
Check out that neat shield effect!
Delightful.
I ended up switching to the Dragon model as it was very well done and quite a lot of work put into it.
Adventures, in other directions
Among other things I also figured out how to have Metal render the model several times. One would use this sort of thing if you had multiple copies of things in a given "scene", think trees and foliage.
Bitmap Fonts
At this point I had implemented the ability to switch between animations and skins, but it wasn't entirely clear what I was looking at. I needed some way to display information.
That's a bitmap font called "Grey Bugs" by Michal Sochon (KaszpiR). My first attempt didn't work out so great:
That is supposed to be "Hello", but due to how I am sampling the texture (the bitmap font) it's not working properly. In short order I managed to get this, which is a definite improvement:
Small problem in that I was specifying the coordinates in the incorrect order so it was flipped and mirrored.
Still, I was quite pleased that I was able to get this to work. There were solutions that involved using the macOS text rendering system to render the text into an image and then displaying that, but that seemed overkill. This is just constructing a series of triangles together (as you can see in the first image), and applying a texture to them.