No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 035: Shader uniform handling and text color bugs

Streamed on 2024-08-21 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

I started tackling a bug with text color where the guess was dropping, but the new colors weren't showing up on the bounce like before. There were a couple of bookkeeping fixes that I tweaked and then the colors showed as we wanted.

After that I moved on to refactoring Shaders to not use std::unordered_map to cache uniform locations. My original plan was modified when I learned of explicit uniform locations. With that new tidbit, it wasn't too bad to get that up and running. The uniforms are automatically detected at shader embed time, before compile time. It feels much better than hashing strings.

During all these refactorings I introduced a new bug or two. One more with text colors not updating properly when a new level starts, and one where the books on the bookshelf aren't rendering with the right texture. I started diving into the text color issue, but the debugger causes crashes related to setting texture parameters, so we got derailed halfway through the investigation. I suspect it is related to the books not rendering right. I prefer to fix one bug at a time, but my debugger has decided that I should debug the other first. We'll pick up there tomorrow.