Rendering woes

On December 4, 2022, I added in a few more models and increased the complexity of the Tiled map to display them.

A simple map in the Tiled editor — The developer art in the Tiled editor

When I loaded up the game, it crashed. I had run into the limit of how large I could make the uniform buffers for passing information into the shaders, and I wouldn’t be able to render all the geometry without making some changes. I tried breaking up entities up and rendering them the same way, but in batches. This resulted in the mess you see below.

Jumbled bricks — A jumbled mess of a dungeon

I got burnt out trying to fix the rendering for a while, and on January 15, 2023 I decided to try again. I spent quite a while debugging, to some entertaining results, but had not yet found a fix.

A very large terrain-colored tile, intersecting with a jumbled brick dungeon — Models were the wrong size and materials got mixed up

Models just would not cooperate

A massive brick wall in the distance, partially covered by fog — Things started vanishing or becoming ominous and looming

I have no idea what is going on anymore

Eventually I decided to scrap the whole way I was rendering, and start loading all my model matrices and materal mappings into SSBOs, and make heavy use of glMultiDrawElementsIndirect. The idea was there, but before it was fixed, it got worse. On January 18, 2023 I was so close to having it working but there was some small issue that mixed everything up.