It’s been more than ten years since I first did OpenGL (and not much since, forgetting everything), but wow has it gotten hard to jump into. It used to be here’s ten lines of code to draw a teapot. Now it’s way more than that, just for a triangle. I know why we switched to shaders, but still. ugh.
I had the opposite experience where it took a bunch of lines to do something basic. I was sure better abstractions were possible that some people-oriented issue in the standards process were preventing from happening. Alan Kay et al’s STEPS project is illustrating that nicely by replacing Cairo’s 50,000 lines of C with an optimizing engine that just took 460 lines of code. I want see what an effort like that on OpenGL would do.
The Google, ACM, and IEEE version of kung fu. Took almost decade of digging through stuff that wasnt worth reading. Although STEPS was in a HN comment, too.
This is also a relevant hands-on walk through (writing your own renderer, in an effort to teach how higher level abstractions like OpenGL, DirectX, et al. works):
https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki
This comes about 4 weeks too late. I just spent days figuring out why my matrix (and later normal calculations) didn’t work as expected. Turns out I a) confused row-major with column-major and b) accidentally used [x y x] as my normals instead of [x y z]
It’s been more than ten years since I first did OpenGL (and not much since, forgetting everything), but wow has it gotten hard to jump into. It used to be here’s ten lines of code to draw a teapot. Now it’s way more than that, just for a triangle. I know why we switched to shaders, but still. ugh.
I had the opposite experience where it took a bunch of lines to do something basic. I was sure better abstractions were possible that some people-oriented issue in the standards process were preventing from happening. Alan Kay et al’s STEPS project is illustrating that nicely by replacing Cairo’s 50,000 lines of C with an optimizing engine that just took 460 lines of code. I want see what an effort like that on OpenGL would do.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf
Reading that basically made me think about abstraction in languages.
Where do you find this stuff @nickpsecurity?
The Google, ACM, and IEEE version of kung fu. Took almost decade of digging through stuff that wasnt worth reading. Although STEPS was in a HN comment, too.
Grandpa Zawinski bitches about it [in depth(https://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/06/i-have-ported-xscreensaver-to-the-iphone/).
He’s not correct in my opinion, mind you, but it’s a decent read.
I wonder if there’d be an audience for a tutorial or book on doing software graphics from scratch?
I’d read it.
The site is completely nonfunctional for me. Opening the browser console, I see the errors:
As well as security warnings about password fields on pages served over http.
“Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming” by Jason L. McKesson is another stunning OpenGL guide (free!); among the best out there.
This is also a relevant hands-on walk through (writing your own renderer, in an effort to teach how higher level abstractions like OpenGL, DirectX, et al. works): https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki
This comes about 4 weeks too late. I just spent days figuring out why my matrix (and later normal calculations) didn’t work as expected. Turns out I a) confused row-major with column-major and b) accidentally used
[x y x]as my normals instead of[x y z]