Particles, and engine progress news - [ook] Once I Owned a Kestrel

Honestly, I am not sure exactly where I was when I wrote my last post, in terms of engine work. That is OK. Or should I said, OOK? ;]

That said, here is what I believe has been accomplished since last update:

1. Finished defining most of the resources and the resource loader. All resources are stored in JSON files. Examples are shaders, materials, particles, etc.
2. Reorganized some rendering code for cleanliness
3. Changed the base unit for vert/frag shaders to a shader object
4. Changed the base unit for textures/shaders to a material
5. Added a basic particle system. This needs work. I don't really like how I am currently doing it, as it isn't very flexible. My plans are to add particle groups so that I can define things like inertia, directional particles, trails, etc.
6. I created a makefile generator script in Python, so I can now compile independent of Xcode. This is the first step toward compiling on Linux and Windows.
7. Finally, I added a lot of checks and redundancies so that when things fail the program doesn't explode. An example is default textures, shaders, materials, particles, etc. I can't vouch for what happens if you delete all the defaults though. ;] There are still a lot of checks to be had.

I will share all of the details of my particle system, as well as some of my creations using it once I make more progress. In the mean time, I am uploading a video of a test explosion particle I made. You can view it in the videos section.