After seeing thread after thread of the same problems, both simple and complex, I've decided to (attempt to) create an online referance of everything that can be done with opengl 1.3. Yes, EVERYTHING.
This rouge thought is still in it's early stages, and before I even start work on building a TOC, i was wondering what you all thought. I say Book/Online Referance because I'm not sure which I will do (i.e. will a publisher take up the offer or not).
If you have any suggestions or opinions (wait, these are the GameDev forums - everyone has an opinion
) then by all means post it here and help me flesh out the TOC before any real work begins. After I've stol.. used all of your ideas I'm going to post it in a few other forums in the internet to get the opinion, and then if it all looks good I will start working on it.
I was going to break it down into these sections (ignoring the manditory book introduction and API history). No, the titles are not final
.
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The First Stages
I think you can figure this one out. Basically, how to create an opengl window for Windows/Mac/Solaris/Linux and any others I can find. I will also go into all of the different modes available (single/double buffering, resolutions, color depths, etc).
Built-In Functionality
Primitives
Textures
Lighting
Fog
Stencil Buffer
Matrix
Camera
Vertex Arrays
Display Lists
Evaluator Functions
Feedback Buffer
Display Lists
Fonts
Using the API
Lighting
Shadows
Textures
Fog
Reflections
Billboarding
Particles
Subdivision surfaces (bezier, catmull-rom, etc)
Skeletal animation (using hw transformations)
OpenGL Libraries
GLU, GLUT, GLAUX. Maybe nVidia's funky template classes too.
GLlibs - GLU
Havent even began thinking about this one yet
GLlibs - GLUT
nor this
GLlibs - GLAUX
and guess what? not this either
Unofficial Libraries
Overview of the OpenGL font library, and anything else that actually uses OpenGL and is popular.
Appendix - The Complete API referance
open gl.h, glu.h, glaux.h, and glut.h and you'll have an idea of what goes in here. It's basically a rewrite of the opengl docs in msdn but with some of the terminology simplified, blending modes properly explained, etc.
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i knocked that up in about 5 mins. Its most probably missing some very blatant features (which you can happily point out). Unlike Dave and Kevin's book, the goal of this book isn't to provide you with how to program games, it's more "how to program opengl", if that makes any sense. It's like the red book and the blue book put together and forming the Pink Book (oh great), but with all the extra stuff that you always wanted to know and can stop fulling this forum with (heh, j/k. trent loves going though those posts daily, so make sure he's got lots to read). We'll call that the "Green Book" (for reasons which i will explain now). So, Combining the Pink Book (255, 0, 255) with the green book (0, 255, 0) thankfully gets rid of the word "pink" and we're left with the White Book. There, that's what it will be known as - "The OGL White Book, with a dash of pink where they forgot some of the extra stuff"
anyway, crap jokes aside, what do you think? this is an open invitation to help, laugh or flame (or do all 3. hell, i do on a regular basis), so please by all means do so.
thanks in advance
EDIT: My amazing html skills strike again (and leave the second half of the post in bold)
Edited by - MENTAL on March 8, 2002 1:14:35 PM
