Greg Sidelnikov of FalloutSoftware.com has applied updates to his OpenGL tutorials. An entirely new article Normal Mapping Tutorial has been added providing several insights on what the pinkish/bluish colors actually represent. The difference between Immediate Mode (glBegin, glEnd) and the modern Vertex Buffer Object technique has been added to the Drawing OpenGL Primitives via VBO tutorial. Better diagrams have been improved in OpenGL Light tutorial. Greg is also planning to start adding GLSL fragment and vertex shader tutorials to the site soon. If this piques your interest you can subscribe to the tutorial newsletter on the site. Greg has been hosting OpenGL tutorials since 2003.

There is a really interesting video from the recent GDC 2013 conference that goes into detail about how Valve and Nvidia ported the Source engine to the Linux platform. The majority of the talk focuses on the port from D3D to OpenGL. There is nothing but glowing praise for OpenGL throughout the talk. Definitely worth checking out!

Mesa, the Open Source OpenGL implementation has released a new major version which includes support for OpenGL 3.1. The release announcement can be found here.

Although Mesa works on multiple platforms, including Windows, it's on open source operating systems like Linux where it is most important. On Linux, Mesa provides hardware accelerated OpenGL when running open-source graphics drivers. This means that if your graphics card is supported, you will get hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3.1 out-of-the-box on operating systems such as Ubuntu and Debian, even when running from a Live CD or bootable USB stick.

Damien wrote in to tell us about his OpenGL tutorial website which focuses on OpenGL 3.3. Apparently this site was referenced during SIGGRAPH and in various books. It's definitely worth taking a look! You can find it here.

As is the tradition at SIGGRAPH, Khronos just announced the OpenGL 4.3 specification alongside its mobile-focused counter-part OpenGL ES 3.0. One of the more interesting announcements is the inclusion of a new royalty-free texture compression extension called ASTC.

As usual you can find the latest specifications on the registry.

The release announcements for the day can be found on the Khronos website.

This is just a heads up to anyone using my 3D math library "kazmath". Kazmath was originally written for Beginning OpenGL Game Programming II but has been continually improved and updated since then. It's now a fairly large library being used by quite a few people. I've recently moved development of kazmath completely from Launchpad over to GitHub. You can find the repository here: https://github.com/Kazade/kazmath

Kazmath is BSD licensed so free to use in both open and closed projects. Feel free to report bugs, and if you improve the library, just send me a pull request on GitHub :)

Open source, and OpenGL powered strategy game 0 A.D has released a new version. Alpha 9 brings a new Roman Republic faction, a new combat system, a new trading system, improved AI and new animations.

If you are a fan of historical RTS's then you definitely should check this out. 0 A.D is free to download for Linux, Mac and Windows from the WildFire Games website

If you are interested in helping out with the project, you can find details on the Get Involved page.

Kevin sent us an email about his site teaching OpenGL ES 2 for Android which looks really cool. If you're an Android developer or plan to be, be sure to have a look!

http://www.learnopengles.com/

Encaitar wrote us an email about compile problems of the old lessons under Windows 7 due to the choice of a character set. As this might interest quite a lot of you, I just show you what he wrote:

The issue is the default in VC10 char* to LPCWSTR conversion. The gamedev forums do mention the issue. This code can be added as one of the many conversions at the bottom of the tutorial page  or the solution of changing the properties in Visual Studio could be included in the text. StackOverFlow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3924926/cannot-convert-parameter-1-from-char-to-lpcwstr) has a question about this issue with a nice screen shot of the option to be changed.

 

As the same issue is present across tutorials I would suggest explaining to a Visual Studio user the source of the problem and the Character Set = Not Set option listed above.

In a follow up to my previous post that Mesa3D (the open-source implementation of the OpenGL API) will begin supporting OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 from the next release; Phoronix is reporting that the open source AMD driver for the R600 series of chipsets can now leverage the new OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa.

The open-source AMD drivers are remarkably stable, although slower than AMD's official "fglrx" driver. The new OpenGL 3.0 support is an amazing step forward for the open-source driver stack.

This means that anyone with an R600 based card (which includes me!) will get full OpenGL 3.0 hardware acceleration out of the box on Linux after the next round of distro releases.

If anyone is curious to see the source code of the commit that introduces this support, take a look here.