We're finally finding time to bring the old lessons up-to-date. The first iOS lessons of the series are already available with more coming. We're also working on a new set of desktop tutorials, this series will include a number of theory lessons before the practical ones, the first brief one is now only which gives a high-level overview of the graphics pipeline.
Check the sidebar for the links, and stay tuned!
If you haven't seen or heard about the Rasberry Pi, where have you been? You're in for a treat!
The Rasberry Pi is a mini credit-card sized system on a chip that will be launching in the next month or so. It will come in two versions, one at $25 and a more expensive one with extra ram at $35. Amazingly, the GPU built into this cheap little computer is faster than that of an iPhone 4S and also faster than Nvidia's Tegra 2!
The board has an HDMI output, is powered by any mini-usb charger and is built to be extended. It is also capable of 1080P video playback. It will support several Linux distributions out of the box and also XBMC the famous open source media center software.
The best thing? It runs OpenGL!
We'll keep you updated on the progress of the release, but apparently the first boards have been manufactured and will be on sale soon.
Desura, the game distribution service that is similar to Steam, has released the source code of their client software under the GPL V3 License.
I've just finished making some minor changes to the site. You can now see the number of comments posted on each news post. Unfortunately this meant changing the way that we link to the Livefyre comment system, so existing comments will have disappeared. As the comment system is pretty recent anyway only a few comments have been lost, sorry about that, it won't happen again! :)
Also, you'll have noticed some layout changes and the addition of social media buttons to the posts. Please click them if you like an article. Thanks!
For those that don't know, Mesa is an open source implementation of the OpenGL API. It's a key component of the open source graphics stack that powers Linux desktops, as well as many other operating systems. Mesa is the default OpenGL implementation for most Linux distributions and is what makes hardware accelerated OpenGL work "out of the box" on those systems. For this reason, the version number of OpenGL it supports is important if you are developing cross-platform OpenGL applications because it is the baseline version that you can target to get the widest audience.
The Mesa developers are currently preparing the next release.
NeHe wishes you all some nice Christmas days and a good start into the new year!
If you want to get started with OpenGL in web applications using the new standard WebGL, one good way to try your ideas is using webglplayground where you can edit your JS code on the fly and see the results immediately. It is bundled with some libraries to make your life easier.
The applications you develop there can even be hosted on their site and embedded in your own webpages. Looks promising!
After getting past the iOS specific hurdles in lesson 01, I finished lesson 02 that shows you how to create a colored triangle by using vertex buffer objects and GLSL shaders!
Go and have a look: iOS Lesson 02
One of the most frequently asked questions in the forums is why the texture loading code from lesson 06 does not compile, complaining about glaux.h not being found.
Well I finally took the time to show you how to get rid of this problem and even better, load textures from a huge variety of file formats with one line of code by using SOIL (Simple OpenGL Image Library).
So read this in conjunction with Lesson 06 for the full fledged texturing experience:
Great news: I finally finished the first lesson in our new iOS series! Have a look in the menu on the right under Mobile Tutorials.
And from today on I'll have more time to work on new lessons so stay tuned, more to come soon!
I'm happy about any kind of feedback about the lesson as well, please use the forum linked at the bottom of the lesson for that.
Go have a look!
APITrace is a graphics debugging tool for tracing and logging calls to OpenGL and D3D to allow you to debug graphics applications. It's written in QT and is entirely cross-platform and open source. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but the screenshots speak for themselves:
You can read Zack's announcement here, and find the source code to the application here.
For those of you interested in the most up to date OpenGL coding: There's a nice pack of sample applications for all OpenGL versions up to 4.2. It doesn't contain a lot of comments, nor does it use the features for complex effects, but they still show how to set up all the different new features! Definitely worth a look if you're using modern OpenGL...
Following on from the release announcement of OpenGL 4.2 a few days ago, AMD have just released a new driver which supports the new specification. It is a *BETA* driver and is available at the following locations:
Windows: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalystOpenGL42BetaWin.aspx
Linux: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/AMDCatalystOpenGL42BetaLinux.aspx
Yeah, I know.. I know! about time!
Some of you have found it already, but for those who haven't you can find it over at http://twitter.com/#!/nehegl
Yep, there's nothing there yet! But at some point soon I'll connect it up to our news stream so you can updates through there. Also, if you didn't already know we have an RSS feed and an Atom feed.
tjbladez told me he is porting the legacy NeHe tutorials to Ruby and makes use of ruby-opengl and gosu. The code looks really neat, and although I never used Ruby I'd say Gosu is worth a try as it seems to make life a lot easier :)
Go check it out!
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Beginning OpenGL Game Programming II
