Uniform Glory

Today was a relatively small day in terms of progress, but that's alright. Summer Break is there for a reason.

I did get back into cubemaps, or essentially using a texture where one can sample from six sides (or a sphere?) with a direction vector instead of a 2D texture coordinate. Neat!

What can these be used for?

Skyboxes, first off. However, the skybox can also be used to sample non-skybox textures, using reflection and refraction effects:

I also had a look at some of the more advanced data techniques that OpenGL has to offer, including access to screen-space coordinates, changing depth values on the fly, and putting data in specific memory locations of a buffer (much like placement new), along with the use of uniform buffers to share uniforms across multiple shaders. Fun experiments with the screen space, though!

What's next? I may quickly go over the geometry shader if I can; that tessellation may come in handy.