I decided to make an entries about the progress with screenshots. So here it ising:
(a power out killed my well parsed literature masterpiece so I have to rewrite the post but in a simpler way):

• window + menubar (only decoration yet)
• openGL
• 3D grid + basic camera control (rotate, zoom, pan, dolly)
• coordinate system icon
• wavefront .obj loading
  • vertex data
  • face data: with polygons, to preserve "edge flow" which is a very important thing in polygon modelling. But polygons are converted to triangle fans, polygon stuff will be maintained through the edges (selectable/non-selectable or visible/non-visible).
  • vertex normal calculation: I don't think I'll bother with smoothing groups, the mesh should be split accordingly. I use the angles between the incoming edges as the weights of the triangle normals, I think that gives the best results. The loader always recalculates vertex normals and ignores normal data in the .obj file.

smooth + vertex display of the mesh

The next things would be texture data loading, splitting the mesh according to the texture coordinates (so only one indexing, geez I don't speak English).

Or not, I'm not sure yet. spliting the mesh would probably screw unfolding, and the user wouldn't know why. So maybe I should only split the mesh for render, if I ever implement vertex buffer whatevers.

And of course loading the texture(s). *sigh*, I have to look for an image loader library for C. And atlas the textures *sigh*.

Sorry for the crap language, the former version was better (...)



EDITED some typos...