OpenGL & C++

Ivan

Heya, just wondering if anyone knows of any decent websites for learning opengl & C++?

phobos

http://www.opengl.org
http://nehe.gamedev.net/ [very good site]
http://www.xmission.com/~nate/opengl.html
http://www.lighthouse3d.com/opengl/glut/
http://www.sgi.com/software/opengl/

BTW just in case you didn't know: GLUT is a windowing toolkit, that let's you get to work on graphics programming (3D rendering, texture mapping, etc), without spending all your time putting together a GUI in C++. I used it before, and it's a piece of pi$$. There is another toolkit, that let's you do some fancy stuff with audio. But GLUT is just a lightweight method for you to do some limited GUI programming, event & IO handling. But for starting out, I highly recommend it.

;-phobos-)

sobriquet

Glut is cool, but that dos window it pops up annoys me. Yeah, it's picky but still. Another option is GLFW - http://hem.passagen.se/opengl/glfw - which does all the same types of things. Windows, Input, Threads and mutexes etc.

http://www.gametutorials.com/ has some good tutorials too.

Another thing you might find handy is DevIL (http://www.imagelib.org), which handles Textures in a very GL friendly manner. Supports loadsa formats. Very handy. Rolling your own is always iffy with file formats.

Silent Bob

Originally posted by sobriquet
Glut is cool, but that dos window it pops up annoys me. Yeah, it's picky but still.

I've never seen GLUT pop up any windows without being asked.

I'd imagine it's Visual Studio that does that (hideous IDE that it is...)

sobriquet

I'd imagine it's Visual Studio that does that

Ah, that could be it. You had to create a Dos/Console app for it, wasn't that it?

[...]hideous IDE[...]

Indeed, VS6 was an abomination. However, VS7 (.Net) gets a lot of things right, though it does require a small supercomputer to run.

phobos

Originally posted by sobriquet
Ah, that could be it. You had to create a Dos/Console app for it, wasn't that it?

Yes you're absolutely right. It's not that GLUT spawns a console window, it's that the code that implements GLUT, must be spawned from a console window. I found the console handy for debugging purposes when I was using it.

If you want to get rid of the console window, you can do so by inserting

// #pragma comment( linker, "/subsystem:\"windows\" /entry:\"mainCRTStartup\"" )

at the beginning of your code

HTH

;-phobos-)

tommycahir

hi ivan
so are you still thinking of doing that 3d chess for your 3rd year project... if so then i wouldnt be worried bout the graphics side id be more worried bout the ai side cos the lads in my class that did that proj got crucified cos the ai wasnt up to scratch