The first technology I focused on past the course content was Spot lighting. This wasn't very difficult, and LearnOpenGL.com has a very good tutorial here. The same site has a useful tutorial for attenuation, which was also easily implemented and helped to achieve the desired "night time" lighting.

I intended on implementing multiple street lights, but this proved challenging as, without special methods, number of lights in a single openGL scene is limited both by the language and the hardware. I also found later on that additional factors tend to slow down my program anyway, so I went for a lighter approach: two spotlights for the headlights of the car, one above the car to show off its texture, and one street light above the passenger/goal.

Collision detection is simple in my case, as I felt a sort of "bounding ring" approach was appropriate and, in my head at least, computationally lighter. I achieve this by calculating the distance between two objects then checking if the distance is less than or equal to the two objects' assigned radii summed together. Collisions are detected on buildings vs. car, passenger vs. car, goal vs. car, and world edges vs. car.

I used this distance calculation to fix a problem I had run into early on in my process, which was that too many instances of the building model I had chosen would slow down the program. Instead of rendering the entire world, I only render the buildings that are within a certain range of the player car. I also used distance as a variable in a mathematical formula to change the height of where the buildings are, that way they were given a sort of rising out of the ground effect as the player drives closer to them.

Finally, I use input from a text file to generate the world around the player. The text file contains a 100x100 ASCII representation of the world, using '-' to represent empty space and 'b' to represent a building. The program reads the file into a 2D array, then references this array during the rendering loop. The rendering loop also references this array to find an open space to place the passengers and goals, randomizing positions in the grid until an open space is found.