The benefit of being a total amateur is the amount of learning and finding out how to do stuff in a better way. This week I’ve been re-factoring my god-awhul mess of a drawing routine and it’s slightly less ugly now.

Naturally when you touch software somewhere, it almost invariable allows or demands changes elsewhere as well. In these occasions I’ve noticed that usually doing things The Right Way forces you to do things The Right Way elsewhere as well.

My main nemesis this week has been OpenGL and my inability to get Alpha blending to work with GL_POINTS with using glBlendColor. This is such a minor detail, but as is probably familiar to most devs, it drives me crazy because it should work the other way (with glColor4x) too!

Making changes to my drawing routines has caused changes in some of the datatypes I’ve made and it will probably cause an overhaul on a number of GUI elements I’ve made. I should have plenty of time to take it apart and put the pieces back again, better this time, before 27th, which is the release date for the next version.