02/27/05
Ok... I added something pretty cool to the site! Try to
guess what it is!
Awwww... come on. You’re not even trying! Ok... forget it!
If you look over at the buttons on the left you’ll notice
that I finally added some forums to the site. That’s right...
you no longer have to leave this site to ask your questions or
to get your daily dose of people arguing over crucial issues
such as OpenGL vs. Direct3D or more importantly… Ninjas vs.
Vampires.
So, run along and get registered before all the good names are
taken and you get stuck with, _Mr_Fluffy_, or
village_idiot079.
Why are you still here?! Go now!
02/17/05
Added a new spot light
sample to the DirectX 9.0 page to
match the point light
sample.
02/15/05
Two new samples have been uploaded. The first one is a
Linux port of the OpenGL based pixel buffer sample,
and the second one is a
simple point lighting sample for DirectX 9.0, which I feel is more
suitable for beginners than my
first Direct3D lighting
sample, which gets a little complicated since it demos
all three light types in one sample.
Off-screen Rendering Using Pixel Buffers (OpenGL - Linux)
Point Lighting
(DirectX 9.0)
Please note that the
original pixel buffer sample (OpenGL - Win32) was split into three versions
depending the method used to create the dynamic texture and,
so far, only version #2 has been ported to Linux. Version #1
is simple enough, but I'm still researching how version #3 can
be ported to Linux since it uses the Windows only extension
WGL_ARB_render_texture. Unfortunately, none of my cards seem
to support the GLX_ARB_render_texture extension so I'm now
forced to look at the vendor specific extensions.
02/09/05
Alright... I’m getting tired of looking at OpenGL code!
My brain is starting to function like a GL state machine:
// Prepare to
watch a little TV!
glDisable(
GL_LIGHT0 );
glMatrixMode(
GL_MODELVIEW );
glLoadIdentity();
gluLookAt( 5.0, 0.0, 5.0,
// Couch position
0.0, 1.5, 0.0,
// TV position
0.0, 1.0, 0.0 );
// Up vector
It’s definitely time for some new Direct3D samples:
Simple Vertex &
Pixel Shader using HLSL
Simple Introduction
to the NovodeX Physics SDK
02/08/05
Lucky you! Some research at work has spawned yet another new OpenGL sample...
if you can call it work. Can you believe I get paid to
research and program 3D graphics! Those suckers! I'd do it
for FREE if I had to! Of course, that's between you and
me... tell no one. I'm currently bucking for a pay raise so
I can buy hundreds of
SLI enhanced
nVIDIA cards, chain them together into a massive
parallel pixel pumping machine and take over the world!
Buwhahahaha
ha ha, Buwhahahaha ha!
Ok... it's official. I've been up way too long with out
sleep!
Any way, this new sample deals with a
multitexture
blending technique which is very useful for blending
terrain textures together. Actually, it's a fairly old
technique, which is quickly being replaced by shaders, but its
nice to know it if you need a fall-back for older cards.
02/07/05
I finally decided to stop being lazy and port the popular
Cg skinning sample to
GLslang. Well, it's not really laziness. I was just putting
it off a bit till I had time to read the new
OpenGL Shading Language book. It really does clear a few
things up and I highly recommend it to anyone who is
seriously into shader development. It's definitely better
than reading a million misleading forum threads, which was
really starting to give me a headache!
02/03/05
Three new OpenGL samples have been posted:
Color Tracking and
Two-Sided Lighting
Multi-Texturing
with Cg
Simple Introduction
to the NovodeX Physics SDK
The first two resulted from helping some people out with a
few questions and third one is the first one in a new series
on game physics. I initially started this series off using
the Tokamak SDK, but its development has basically slowed to a crawl and
I’m afraid it’s not making much headway. The
Novodex SDK is very
similar to Tokamak and it was recently
selected by Epic
Games for their Unreal engine so you know they got their
stuff together. On top of that, you can download and use Novodex SDK for free for non-commercial applications. Of
course, I’ll leave the Tokamak samples up as long people
want them. Tokamak's last release (1.2) is very stable and
their license is a little more liberal.
02/01/05
If you visit this site for OpenGL code you should know
that there’s been a major overhaul of the
OpenGL samples. I’ve decided to
clean up my samples by removing any dependencies on GLUT
that may exist. Don’t get me wrong, GLUT is a fine windowing
toolkit but most of my OpenGL samples already use the Win32
API to create their window so I don’t really need GLUT for
that. All I really use from GLUT is the teapot model and the
functions related to bitmap based character fonts and it
seems a shame to have to link in a whole library just for
that. So… to sever this tie I download the source code to
Freeglut and I pulled out everything that I would need to
become literally free from GLUT.
The great thing about this change is that it eliminates a
whole category of, "Help! Your code doesn’t compile!"
emails. Now, newbie programmers who don’t have GLUT
installed, let alone now what it is, can just download the
samples and compile away. Of course, you still need a
compiler, which results in another category of emails that I
call, "I changed your code with Notepad, but nothing
happens!" emails. Yikes! ;)
Also, all of the Cg shader samples have been updated to
Cg 1.3 so if Cg is your thing, check them out. They’ll
probably get updated a few more times while I attempt to
replace all of the deprecated features with the new
features.
You should also note that a few of the OpenGL based samples
that use Cg still refuse to work on my ATI card (Radeon 9700
Pro) but somehow "mysteriously" work fine on my nVIDIA card (GeForce
5900 FX Ultra). I’m working on it, but it’s most likely a bug
in Cg 1.3 since the samples in question are so simple and
worked fine under Cg 1.2.1. Either way, it's annoying since Cg
was supposed to be agnostic when it comes to the hardware and
this feature of the language seems to be slipping away with
each release.
01/18/05
If you’re interested, all
of the
GLslang shader samples have been updated. They
now make better use GLslang's built-in variables when
needed. This allows me to fix the problem I had earlier
where I was being forced to create both a vertex and
fragment shader when I only needed one or the other - but
not both.
01/17/05
I have another shader port for you guys. This time I have
ported the grayscale
shader from Cg to GLslang. Hopefully, these side-by-side
comparisons of different shader APIs prove useful for those
of you out there who are trying to navigate the seemingly
endless sea of shader options.
I also fixed a few of the OpenGL samples which use a
textured sphere for testing purposes. The code that generated
the sphere was accidentally laying the texture coordinates out
in reverse which was causing the textures to be applied
backwards. Several months ago someone out there emailed me
about this problem, but I lost the email and totally forgot
about it till someone at work mentioned it again. Sorry about
that.
I’m actually surprised that in two something years only
two people noticed that the earth texture used in those
samples was being applied backwards! Come on people... it's
our home planet! You guys should notice things like that...
unless, of course, this is not your home planet and based on a
few of the weird emails that I get... there's a few of you out
there! That's why I recently added a few sample that use a
texture map of Mars instead. You know... I'm just trying to
make you guys feel at home. ;)
01/12/05
For those of you out there that are currently developing
shaders using Cg, you should note that the
Cg
based shader samples offered on this site require Cg
1.2.1. I haven’t ported any of my samples to the beta release
of Cg 1.3 and I probably won't until it officially releases.
I just thought that I would warn you now because all of my
Cg samples are broken under Cg 1.3 beta 2 and this is
confusing some people out there who have that beta
installed.
If any one knows a quick fix for this, please let me know.
I currently don't have time to investigate it and feel sorry
for those that have decided to bite-the-bullet and install
this new beta.
01/05/05
For those of you that are interested in learning more
about the Torque Game Engine, the
Torque tutorials offered by my site have been updated
and now use the “tutorial.base” example which ships with
Torque. When I first wrote these tutorials, an official
starting place for writing Torque tutorials didn’t exist so
I was forced to write my own. With time, the Torque team was
nice enough to add an official one to their engine's SDK so
I decided to port my beginner-level tutorials over to their
new “tutorial.base” example. Hopefully, I’ll also find some
free-time to write up a few new tutorials as well.
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