A Light Shines Through the Weathered Boards

I had my meeting with Keenan this morning and am very happy with our discussion. He was exteremely helpful in looking at my code and explaining some of the physics to me. It turns out that the problems I am having aren't caused by what I suspected, but deeper, more foundational issues. This might sound like a discovery in the negative direction, but actually, it makes me more confident that I can make progress now. For me, understanding where the issue is is more important than fixing it by hacking and not knowing why it works now.

Anyway, the reason I decided to blog now rather than waiting until I worked today was because I want to jot down my "itinerary" of code stops that I have to make, in order to sort them all out in my head. So, here are the things that I need to fix/look at in priority order:

• Reformat base code in Primitive Object to create transformation matrices on the fly in the update, and move persistent matrices into the model itself. The primitive object should only store the attributes, like the degrees for rotation. Like Keenan said, these are "little notecards to yourself". Ensure that this is working properly before moving on to anything else.
• Create a low-poly sphere in Maya, and export it as an fbx as triangles (not quads).
• Taking tonight's upcoming lecture into account, work out how to import this fbx into my code and convert it to binary data to read in the model.
• Use this model of the sphere, or even just the verts (in this case, make a sphere model, like any of the other primitives), to draw the bounding sphere.
• Test sphere to sphere collisions now and get them working (use printf to test).
• Give the sphere the capability to toggle wireframe vs solid mode for visual collision check. 

So, I think that fixing the matrices is going to solve a lot of my issues, because I will then have a solid base with no hidden, hacky caveats.

Off to work on it then!