Start with WebGL, Shadertoy.com, and jsfiddle.net.
No other tooling needed until you've got the basics of vertex buffers and shaders down.
(20 year graphics veteran here who's boostrapped some coworkers)
No other tooling needed until you've got the basics of vertex buffers and shaders down.
(20 year graphics veteran here who's boostrapped some coworkers)
I recommend reversing that - ignore the math and just get a triangle on screen using a trivial shader (takes a few dozen lines of code in WebGL), then learn about how shaders and matrices work by applying them to your triangle.
I know some would say it's a bad language, but back in the day it was incredibly accessible and spawned a lot of shared code and tutorials. If you focus on the techniques and algorithms, treat the language as pseudocode rather than "the right way to do things", you can have a lot of fun and learn quickly things you can translate to whatever your language of choice is.
That really isn't how modern, accelerated graphics works - even 2D accelerated graphics! "Sprites" are slightly closer to the mark, but it goes far beyond that.
All that happens on the fly without intermediary frame buffer composition in between. The output goes directly to the display (over HDMI, eDP/displayport, DVI, etc.).
Yeah, and of course mouse cursor is a sprite in the traditional sense. Although on modern HW you could implement mouse cursor as a hardware layer.
C64, Amiga, MSX, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, etc. all supported hardware layer sprites back in the eighties.
I'd say, a good way to do it, is first learn theory, and apply it using simple tools that let you just draw on screen (like SDL). Then learn a GPU targeted API.
I spent a while getting an OpenGL environment setup in VisualStudio and got frustrated with the tooling as I've also been spending much of the last 3 years doing trivial web development. I ran across shadertoy and was able to whip up much of the core of the pathtracer there and very easily move it over to it's own project supper easily utilising REGL (https://github.com/regl-project/regl) in ~100 lines that included a camera, dynamic shader compilation based on a scene, etc...