iPhone Racer, Part 4

I created a fairly ugly Formula 1-type car in 3D and exported it as an OBJ file. The OBJ format is a very simple and fairly common plain text format for 3D objects. However, it is not a very compact format, so it takes up a lot of space.

The usual approach is to create an importer in the game engine that can parse and load the OBJ file, but I created a converter in REBOL instead. The converter reads the OBJ file, optimizes the geometric data for use with vertex buffer objects in OpenGL, and finally saves the data in a binary file.

I then wrote a corresponding file loader in C++ in the game framework. It basically loads the binary file straight into the vertex buffer object, since the converter has already organized the data in the same way it is stored in memory.

A lot of things can be improved, but at least now I have a 3D car to play with in my game code. I guess the road may be next!

Comments: 0 Tags: game, iPhone, OpenGL