Rotating 2D camera to space ship's heading in OpenGL (OpenTK) - opengl

Question

The game is a top-down 2D space ship game -- think of "Asteroids."
Box2Dx is the physics engine and I extended the included DebugDraw, based on OpenTK, to draw additional game objects. Moving the camera so it's always centered on the player's ship and zooming in and out work perfectly. However, I really need the camera to rotate along with the ship so it's always facing in the same direction. That is, the ship will appear to be frozen in the center of the screen and the rest of the game world rotates around it as it turns.
I've tried adapting code samples, but nothing works. The best I've been able to achieve is a skewed and cut-off rendering.
Render loop:
// Clear.
Gl.glClear(Gl.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | Gl.GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
// other rendering omitted (planets, ships, etc.)
this.OpenGlControl.Draw();
Update view -- centers on ship and should rotate to match its angle. For now, I'm just trying to rotate it by an arbitrary angle for a proof of concept, but no dice:
public void RefreshView()
{
int width = this.OpenGlControl.Width;
int height = this.OpenGlControl.Height;
Gl.glViewport(0, 0, width, height);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_PROJECTION);
Gl.glLoadIdentity();
float ratio = (float)width / (float)height;
Vec2 extents = new Vec2(ratio * 25.0f, 25.0f);
extents *= viewZoom;
// rotate the view
var shipAngle = 180.0f; // just a test angle for proof of concept
Gl.glRotatef(shipAngle, 0, 0, 0);
Vec2 lower = this.viewCenter - extents;
Vec2 upper = this.viewCenter + extents;
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_MODELVIEW);
}
Now, I'm obviously doing this wrong. Degrees of 0 and 180 will keep it right-side-up or flip it, but any other degree will actually zoom it in/out or result in only blackness, nothing rendered. Below are examples:
If ship angle is 0.0f, then game world is as expected:
Degree of 180.0f flips it vertically... seems promising:
Degree of 45 zooms out and doesn't rotate at all... that's odd:
Degree of 90 returns all black. In case you've never seen black:
Please help!

Answer 1

Firstly the 2-4 arguments are the axis, so please state them correctly as stated by #pingul.
More importantly the rotation is applied to the projection matrix.
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
In this line your Orthogonal 2D projection matrix is being multiplied with the previous rotation and applied to your projection matrix. Which I believe is not what you want.
The solution would be move your rotation call to a place after the model view matrix mode is selected, as below
// L/R/B/T
Glu.gluOrtho2D(lower.X, upper.X, lower.Y, upper.Y);
Gl.glMatrixMode(Gl.GL_MODELVIEW);
// rotate the view
var shipAngle = 180.0f; // just a test angle for proof of concept
Gl.glRotatef(shipAngle, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);
And now your rotations will be applied to the model-view matrix stack. (I believe this is the effect you want). Keep in mind that glRotatef() creates a rotation matrix and multiplies it with the matrix at the top of the selected stack stack.
I would also strongly suggest you move away from fixed function pipeline if possible as suggested by #BDL.