Software Engineer in the Games Industry. Love all things technological. Afrikaans en trots!
11
Jul
2007
Small update:
Ok so in me free time I am still crafting away on a small little project that uses OpenGL.
I am getting closer to finishing the first release.
Will keep you up to date as soon as I make it available.
On another note, I just received my copy of the Orange book today. It seems to very good. Will let you know what I think after reading it.
21
Oct
2006
Aaaah I have forgotten what a joy it can be to use OpenGL as a rendering API.
Yes, the people that know me, you read that correctly. When I was getting into 3D I was using OpenGL, then I moved over to Direct3D and have only been using that since. However there where always certain points in time when I got a craving to just do something again in OpenGL. Alas that day never came until recently.
I must admit the main reason I switched over to Direct3D was that back in “those” days, Direct3D was supperior to OpenGL. It had a very nice helper library (D3DX), in general Direct3D at that time was just more up to speed with the latest technology. For the last couple of years however OpenGL is just as good as Direct3D, and in the end both of them are just an API to access what the GPU can offer (well you know what I mean).
About 3 weeks ago I got a real craving for doing a personal project or two. Since it has been about 2 years (the 2 years I have been in the games industy thus far) since I last did any personal 3D programming (engine, game, etc). I mainly got the craving for learning shaders again, since it has been “years” since I last touched them and what the heck I had the free time on my hands since I was waiting to get my leave to remain in England before I can start at Criterion.
My only real problem was to decide on which API to use this time, Direct3D or OpenGL. In the end I decided to not use Direct3D until version 10 comes out with Vista and I decide to switch over to Vista. So because I don’t want to play around again with D3D 9 and since MS have changed quite a bit of the stuff, I decided to go with an old time favourite…OpenGL. Well ok that is not just the only reason, the other reason aswell is that since I will be doing Maya tools at Criterion and Maya uses OpenGL, I figured I can’t go wrong.
So I changed my libraries (well just me graphics library) a bit and decided to not write an engine this time (well just another one that gets made half way and then get paused and eventually canned). Instead this time I made my goals for myself very clear. No engine, no game just a couple of demos for learning purposes. For example, I have never implemented parallax mapping, so viola one of my demos or samples would be to implement parallax mapping. I am currently just writing a small framework that I will be using to write my demos or samples. At this stage my framework uses my code base (a couple of general libraries that can be used for any general 3d programming). When my framework and code base is at a decent stage then I will release the source code for anyone to use as they please.
