GDTLancer / J2MELancer custom rendering engine for space game
Decided to cobble up a custom engine for a j2me platform for a space game. Why? It is limiting (which makes you solve technical issues and think about important gameplay things rather than visuals and assets, which provide limitless possibilities), portable (runs on java phones and emulators like J2ME Loader or Kemulator), and I just love old phones and want to give them new purpose.
So what's so special about this renderer? Well, it uses fixed-point math (Q24.8) and lookup tables for sin, cos, acos, sqrt, dot, cross, and so on (I would never have managed to pull it off without ChatGPT o1. It is a monster when it comes to solving complex math with edge cases). Presumably, within 8000 km from the origin there will be no jitter with about 4 mm precision. With lookup tables and fixed-point math which is done on integers it also should be fast at calculations. How fast? I don't know but really looking up to stress-testing it.
The renderer itself is a classical projection that only renders edges between vertices onto a canvas. Not sure how much performance will that cost me in the end, but I don't want to deal with java m3g (sjr-184) backend and would rather write it all from scratch (for numerous reasons). I aim at retrofuturism and taking my inspiration from original Elite, and not only that.