The OpenGL itch...

So I jumped fences for a couple of days and programmed my very first OpenGL application. I built a little wrapper around a few common 3D operations (transformations, cube maps, textures, cameras, lights, shaders) and then made a demo to show what I did. The end result is an application that displays three shaders. The shaders are environmental gloss, cel shading, and specular normal mapping. You can download the binary and the source from my site. Here are some images of the shaders.



The OpenGL bitch...

Ok so like I said it was my first time with OpenGL and I probably don't have a very good grasp on it, but already I'm noticing a lot of little things I don't like about it. To use an analogy lets say that you want to build a model airplane. You go out to the store and get an airplane kit. When you get home and start to assemble the plane you notice that it didn't come with any propellers and the rear wing is missing. Maybe I've just been spoiled by DirectX for so long that I've come to expect a complete package (which OpenGL is not). In order to get OpenGL on par with DirectX you'll need to use other developer's licensed libraries or build your own. Like I said I'm really new to GL and I don't know if these issues are already being addressed but it seems to me that the best thing for OpenGL is to get taken over by Microsoft. [grin] That way we can have decent texture loading, font classes, and other little niceties that DX developers have come to enjoy - right out of the box.

The good news...

I'm not dead and I did manage to get a small framework that I can build on, should I feel then need to stab myself with OpenGL again.

In other news I've been continuing my work on the Troll character. I'm doing mostly animations at the moment. Also I've been playing around with asm and SSE for the fun of it.