Modern OpenGL free documentation

[Sylvain Beucler]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 08:44:08AM +0200, Guus Sliepen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 12:41:47AM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> 
> > OpenGL 2.x introduces a programmable pipeline with the new shaders
> > system, and is notably available in mobile devices (OpenGL ES 2) as
> > well as more recently in WebGL.
> > 
> > I was looking for free documentation on this "modern" OpenGL 2.x, and
> > was disappointed to find little of it: most of what I found was using
> > the "legacy" 1.x API, and the rest was non-free.  It's a gap to fill
> > for the free gaming scene!
> 
> Hm, I did not have a problem finding the reference manual and some tutorials
> online. There is much on opengl.org itself, and the NeHe tutorials are also
> being rewritten for OpenGL 2.0. But indeed maybe there is nothing free in book
> form yet.

I mean "free-as-in-freedom" :) In particular NeHe's tutorials are
under no clear license.  I see that Gamedev (who bought its rights)
plans to make the future code samples under a liberal license [1], but
I don't know if they plan to release the new tutorials themselves
freely.  Do you have more information about this rewrite and its
licensing?  Did it actually start?

[1] http://www.gamedev.net/topic/608611-licencing-for-nehes-tga-image-loader/

The reference PDFs at opengl.org does not seem free ("may not be
reproduced" yada yada :/) and are very hard to use for a beginner.

If you've got Free introductory information about OpenGL 2, can you
add the links to the wikibook page or send them here?  I'll check them
out.


> > Consequently I started a on-going series of tutorials at WikiBooks
> > (CC-BY-SA) beginning from scratch:
> > 
> >   http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenGL_Programming#Modern_OpenGL
> 
> Great!
> 
> > The code samples are in the public domain:
> > 
> >   https://gitorious.org/wikibooks-opengl/modern-tutorials/trees/master
> 
> I see you are using libglm for the CPU side mathematics, great ;)

:)


> > Comments and contributions welcome :)
> > What do you think of it?
> 
> It looks great, although the teapot example is very complex compared to the
> previous examples.

Yes, it may be best to put it after other tutorials when more are
available (plus, the teapot could use some lightning).


> Maybe you can also make it more clear what the advantages
> of the OpenGL 2.0 way are; at first the vertex arrays and shaders look like a
> pain to work with compared to the old immediate mode and fixed rendering
> pipeline. However, in the end, especially if you are using buffer objects, your
> code will be much cleaner and the graphics will be faster.

Yes.  It's not easy to explain the pros before introducing the
concepts (buffers, shaders, ...).  I'm trying to find good examples to
illustrate the advantages, which I think will come naturally as the
tutorials complexity grows.  We can add what you just wrote to the
first tutorial though :)


Thanks for your input!

-- 
Sylvain