Zero Point

Where Forest Meets Village — a 2D OpenGL environmental simulation

Zero Point renders a split world: a dense forest in the upper-left, a quiet village in the lower-right, and a diagonal river between them. The world transitions between day and night, changing lighting, color palette, and active wildlife.

Scene Overview

Zone	Elements
Sky	Sun/moon, drifting clouds, stars, birds
Forest (upper-left)	Trees, layered grass, deer (night), fireflies (night)
Village (lower-right)	Houses, windmill, clothesline, fence, cat (day)
River (diagonal)	Bresenham banks, animated flow streaks

Controls

Key	Action
Space	Toggle day/night
Esc / q / Q	Quit

Auto cycle: day/night toggles about every 10 seconds.

Features

• Day/night rendering with different tones and active entities
• Smooth animation loop (~16 ms timer) for clouds, birds, windmill, cat, deer, and fireflies
• Classic graphics algorithms:
  • Bresenham line drawing (river banks)
  • DDA line drawing (fence)
  • Midpoint circle (sun/moon)
• 2D transformation use cases: translation, rotation, and scaling

Build and Run

Prerequisites

• CMake 3.10+
• C++20 compiler
• OpenGL
• GLUT/FreeGLUT

Linux (FreeGLUT)

Install dependencies (Debian/Ubuntu example):

sudo apt install build-essential cmake freeglut3-dev

Build and run:

cmake -B build
cmake --build build
./build/ZeroPoint

macOS

Install dependencies (Homebrew example):

brew install cmake freeglut

Then build and run with the same commands above.

Windows

Use Visual Studio (or another CMake-capable toolchain) with OpenGL + GLUT available in your environment, then:

cmake -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

Run the produced ZeroPoint executable from the build output directory.