Hi, guys
I want to implement a normalization cubemap which transforms the arbitary directional vectors into its normal form, and
I have studied the following reference sources:

paul's projects:
http://www.paulsprojects.net/tutoria...implebump.html

openGL cubemap specification:
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-samp...e_cube_map.txt

The problem is that I don't understand the following code snippet from paul's project for the construction of normalization cubemap:

normalization cubemap:
    unsigned char * data=new unsigned char[32*32*3];

    if(!data)

    {

        printf("Unable to allocate memory for texture data for cube map\n");

        return false;

    }



    //some useful variables

    int size=32;

    float offset=0.5f;

    float halfSize=16.0f;

    VECTOR3D tempVector;

    unsigned char * bytePtr;



    //positive x

    bytePtr=data;



    for(int j=0; j<size; j++)

    {

        for(int i=0; i<size; i++)

        {

            tempVector.SetX(halfSize);

            tempVector.SetY(-(j+offset-halfSize));

            tempVector.SetZ(-(i+offset-halfSize));



            tempVector.Normalize();

            tempVector.PackTo01();



            bytePtr[0]=(unsigned char)(tempVector.GetX()*255);

            bytePtr[1]=(unsigned char)(tempVector.GetY()*255);

            bytePtr[2]=(unsigned char)(tempVector.GetZ()*255);



            bytePtr+=3;

        }

    }

    glTexImage2D(    GL_TEXTURE_CUBE_MAP_POSITIVE_X_ARB,

                    0, GL_RGBA8, 32, 32, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, data);

I have two questions here:
1. We all know the first element of array which is supplied as texture data corresponds to the lower-left corner of texture image, but in this
case the for loop just start by adding the directional vector with x > 0 , y > 0 and z > 0 to the first element of array, and the direction pointed
by that vector is not the lower-left corner if when we think the face of cubemap as texture image and view it from positive x-axis to the
negative x-axis. Is this code error or do I misunderstand something?

2. Why do we need to add the offset to change the components of directional vector?

I got stuck for this problem about two days, any suggestions or reference source will be appreciated.