13/12/20 - Creating a window

[jakelacey2012]

You can't draw anything to the screen if you don't have a window, so we need to learn how to create a window. I knew I wanted to use OpenGL for drawing onto the screen (mainly because its the only thing I've heard of :P) and I knew I wanted some platform agnostic API.

This is where I found GLFW, this tutorial does a pretty good job explaining how to configure it with windows, one critique I do have is that there are a lot of manual steps in order to configure this, it would be nice if I could run a command in the library could be linked for me.

This code here also does a pretty good job explaining how to setup the code, I've changed the structure somewhat so the interface is separate from the rest of my application.

What I would like to do is get to a code structure which looks something like this...

void Game::Init()
{
	Logger logger = CreateLogger();
	Window window = CreateWindow(&logger, 640, 480, "Title");
        
        if(!windows.Ready()) 
        {
                logger.Error("Window is not ready");
                window.Terminate();
                return;
        }

	while (!window.ShouldClose()) 
	{
                tick(&logger, &window); // clearing, drawing and polling for events goes here.
	}
      
      logger.Info("Game has finished");
      window.Terminate();
}

You can see what the code looks like currently at the time of writing here.

In the next post we'll draw something to this screen (#6)