Soggy

Getting pixels on the screen has become quite an involved task. A modern GPU generally doesn't really want your pixels, it wants vertices and shaders and textures. For many projects, this can really get in the way from getting pixels to the screen.

This is not a novel observation; many people have made it before me, and have said many things about it, maybe even tried their hand at a solution to or mitigation for this problem. One such case is Fenster. It gives you the straightforward ability to get pixels to the screen (with some more nice utilities), and it is the main inspiration for my library.

Soggy gives the user 2 buffers: a high resolution buffer (native), and a low resolution buffer (a division of native). The user can set the scale of the lowres buffer, the window title, and a few other windowing settings in a provided window info (Winfo) struct, and from there, all that they need to get started is three functions:

• start(&winfo)
• loop(&winfo)
• exit(&winfo)

Of course, Soggy provides more, both in drawing utilities, as well as system information. Keyboard and mouth inputs can all be found in the Winfo struct. There are functions for drawing both a small bitfont, as well as a more proper fullsize non-monospace font. There are a couple vector utily functions as well (clamps, comparisons, etc).

Soggy is currently written in Odin, and I'm constantly adding features, but the basic project template looks like this:

import "soggy"

main :: proc() {
    raw_winfo := soggy.Winfo {
        window_title = "name",
        hi_init_size = {1280, 800},
        lo_scale = 4,
        hi_minimum_size = {600, 600},
    }
    if !soggy.start(winfo) do return
    defer soggy.exit(winfo)
    
    for soggy.loop(winfo) {
        if winfo.keyboard[soggy.KEY_ESC] == .press do break
        /* do things here */
    }
}

Technical Details

Under the hood, it uses GLFW and OpenGL. A Program_layer is just used as a texture, rendering onto a single triangle (not a quad!). Everything else is software rendered onto the texture (which is intended design). This is very nice for simple basic stuff, but when you're doing some really complex graphics that require very high fidelity, it can get quite slow (do not underestimate how fast CPU's are nowadays though!).

There is currently no repo that has the most up-to-date version of soggy, but Drizzle does use a version of it.