Modern OpenGL free documentation

[Guus Sliepen]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:32:27AM +0200, Sylvain Beucler wrote:

> > 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 though the intention was that they were sort of Public Domain, but you are
right that there is no clear license statement.

> 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?

Hm, I actually noticed about Gamedev just now. I remember from before (half a
year ago?) that they had the first 10 or so tutorials also in OpenGL ES 2.0
compatible form. But now I cannot find it. Or maybe my memory is wrong.

> 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.

You are right.

> 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.

Hm, everything I knew is not really Free. But if I find something I will.

> > 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 :)

I've mainly used OpenGL for scientific data visualisation. One of the
advantages of OpenGL 2.0 is that it becomes very easy to send images or
datapoints to the GPU without any modification, and have it render it exactly
how you want. I'll add simple examples from my own work, that I think
illustrate the usefulness of VBOs and shaders, to the wiki when I have some
time, and let you know.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / with kind regards,
      Guus Sliepen <guus at debian.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 198 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/games/attachments/20110830/df89cafd/attachment.pgp>