An introduction to modern OpenGL | Hacker News Reader

An introduction to modern OpenGL

duriansoftware.com

115 pointsmotter11 comments

OpenGL 2.0 isn't particularly modern (released in 2004), but its featureset is a good baseline if you want to make sure your application works on just about any even remotely modern hardware.

I suppose the "modern" in the title refers to the fact that the tutorial introduces vertex buffers and shaders right from the beginning, rather than delving into antique cruft such as immediate mode and fixed-function pipeline. This is indeed a good thing.

Note that this is in several parts. All are well worth reading:

http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Tab...

Personally, I like this one:

http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/

So very necessary!

The internet is awash with old legacy OpenGL that is a bad example to newcomers.

I would love a version of this tutorial written for WebGL.

The last version of Glut, 3.7 is from 1998, according to files dates. Is it really usable?

It still worked the last time I tried it a couple of years ago. If it gives you any trouble there is FreeGlut that is an OSS API compatible work a like. Its last release was this month.

Freeglut is still maintained (with the latest release a few weeks ago), but I don't know how good it is. I've used GLFW for all my OpenGL experiments.

No, that version is not usable because the underlying API's (WGL and GLX) have since updated and using that ancient version of GLUT will not allow you to use OpenGL 3+ at all. There's also a bunch of other features introduced by WGL and GLX API changes.

The original GLUT was written for an OpenGL book (IIRC, the red book) so that the code examples wouldn't occupy so much space on paper. It wasn't probably intended to be used for real applications at all.

GLUT is pretty horrible (Does not support key bindings such as "Shift+Tab", does not report key presses when a different language layout is selected). GLFW seems much better, and simpler.

@NelsonMinar - I couldn't agree more. I'm currently learning OpenGL and having a hell of a time putting it all together.

Thankfully I found a quick reference card for OpenGL 4.2, then I can see what's core then extrapolate from there.

But yes there sure is a lot of schmutz out there.

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