Should i learn opengl

Learning and using modern OpenGL requires a strong knowledge of graphics programming and how OpenGL operates under the hood to really get the best of your experience. So we will start by discussing core graphics aspects, how OpenGL actually draws pixels to your screen, and how we can leverage that knowledge to create some funky looking effects.

On top of the core knowledge we will discuss many useful techniques that you can use for your applications, like: traversing a scene, create beautiful lighting, load custom-made objects from a modelling program, do cool post-processing techniques, and much more. We also feature a walkthrough series where we actually create a small game based on our obtained OpenGL knowledge, so you will really get a feel of what it's like to actually do graphics programming.

Learn OpenGL is free, and will always be free, for anyone who wants to start with graphics programming. All content is available here at the menu to your left. Simply hit the Introduction button and you're ready to start your journey!

The content has been thoroughly revised, numerous times, over the course of 7 years to have finally been aggregated into a physical copy available for print. There's been a lot of work put into the physical copy, treating it as the first-class citizen it is.

Both the book and website are equals, their content is the same. These values range between 0 and 1; these are very similar to 0 to And these are red, green, blue, and alpha values. Next, we'll clear the screen with the help of glClear.

It swaps the window if double buffering is present; if not, then it won't. You will get the same OpenGL window as we got in the preceding sections.

But, first, let's understand what SFML is. SFML is a simple and fast multimedia library. It's a software development library designed for cross-platform use to provide a programming interface for various multimedia components on the system. It allows you to do stuff like handle or render windows, so we can draw our OpenGL and handle events, such as various inputs, and it also allows us to handle textures. The file will be downloaded as a ZIP file onto your system.

The steps to link the SFML and GLEW libraries to our project with absolute or relative linking are similar to what we discussed in the previous sections. The only difference will be in the step where we link up the. For that, go to Additional Dependencies and in the textbox, just type in opengl Then, we'll type glew32s.

And to link SFML libraries, we'll type sfml-graphics. As seen in the previous sections, before we begin with coding, we need to place the dynamic link library into our project. We'll also have to copy and paste the glew Check out the below mentioned steps:. In the preceding lines of code, we've defined the GLint constant. The reason we're creating constant global variables is so that we can easily use these wherever we need them in the code, whether that's for initially creating the window or for manipulating some sort of shape.

In the preceding lines of code, we've defined some settings for our application and rendering window:. Here, the majorVersion and minorVersion that we defined in the preceding lines of code are for setting the version of OpenGL.

Here, we set the version as 3. If you wish to set up for any other version, you'll have to make changes accordingly. The majorVersion is to the left of the decimal point and the minorVersion is to the right of the decimal point. In the preceding while loop, we are stating that if the window is closed, we are going to stop running our application and break out of our loop.

Let's run our code and check whether there are any errors. If no errors pop up, we'll get a rendering window as output, similar to what we have witnessed in the previous sections.

And, we also discussed how to link the libraries to our projects using absolute or relative linking. We then created rendering windows to display OpenGL graphics. In the next chapter, we'll learn how to draw shapes like triangle and rectangle using OpenGL. Also, we'll discuss about how to apply colors and textures to the shapes. Frahaan is the CEO of Sonar Systems which is the world leader in educational material for the game engine Cocos2d-x, one of the best and the most popular game engines in the world.

With years of experience in programming and running an online education platform Sonar Learning , he enjoys to help and support new programmers like you. Applied machine learning with a solid foundation in theory. Publication date: August Publisher Packt. Pages ISBN Download code from GitHub.

Chapter 1. Setting Up OpenGL. Downloading the essential libraries Setting up a project on different platforms to use the libraries Creating an OpenGL rendering window using the libraries. Note You can refer to all the code files for this chapter in the Chapter01 folder on GitHub.

Downloading the essential libraries. First of all, we will need Visual Studio. You might have already installed it. If you did, it's fantastic. Then, follow the instructions and install Visual Studio onto your system.

Note If you have the Pro version, that's fantastic, but the Community version will more than suffice. Note When you extract the files, they won't be named nicely and you might find it confusing to view with all the version numbers and stuff. Once you have done that, we will move on to downloading OpenGL framework library files.

We will want to download the precompiled binaries for Windows. As seen in the following screenshot, select and click to download either the bit or bit version as per your system requirements:. Note Note : Even if you know you need to download the bit version for developing on a bit machine, try to stick with the bit version, because unless you think your game or your application is going to be using more than 4 GB of memory, the bit version will more than suffice and it will help you in maximizing compatibility.

Open Visual Studio, and then click on Create new Project Now, right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer window. Next, right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer window.

Click on Properties. As highlighted in the preceding screenshot, click on the new button and then click on the three dots. Select the include folder and then click on the Select Folder button. Next, we repeat the same process to add the GLFW library to our project. Once we have included both the libraries, click on the OK button.

Repeat the same process to include GLFW libraries. But for GLFW, you've got a bunch of different libraries that you could choose from. For our project, it's best that we select the lib-vc folder. Once you have added both the libraries, click on the OK button. Next, we'll go to Linker Input , and then go to Additional Dependencies. Click on the dropdown, and then click on Edit. What we'll do here is type opengl Next, we'll type glew32s.

This is the static library and it will be statically linked to your project. If you don't want to statically link it, you can just remove the s from the suffix; it is up to you. Next, we'll type glfw3. Then, click on the Apply button. Click on Create new project Name the project GLApp since we are learning how to relatively link the libraries, we've created a different project. Then, in the New Project window, click on the Browse Go to the OpenGL folder that we've created on the desktop we are using this folder structure format to understand relative linking.

Just select the folder and then click OK. One more thing you need to do before starting the project is to create a folder called External Libraries within the OpenGL folder on desktop where you have saved your project. Now, we'll right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer window. Go to Add New Item. Next, right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer window and go to Properties. Then, click on the new button.

As we are doing relative linking in this section, we won't click on the three dots. Clicking on them is for absolute linking only, as we have to browse to the directory where we have stored the libraries. So if we were to specify a folder in the path, whenever we do something new in the project it'd be relatively linked to wherever that file is located. To include the files in our project, add the paths as shown in the following screenshot and then click on the OK button:.

Next, we'll link up the libraries. Click on the dropdown, click on Edit , and then click on New. Add the paths as shown in the following screenshot, and then click OK and then Apply:. Now, we've got one more thing to do, and that is to link up the. So, go to Linker Input , and then go to Additional Dependencies. Now, in the textbox, just type opengl Next, on a new line, just type glew32s.

Then, click OK and click on the Apply button. Adding a dynamic link library to the project. Then, copy the glew Do as mentioned in the previous step to add the GLFW.

Note Make a note that, since we're installing the libraries on the system itself and not in our project, whenever you move your project to a different system, you will have to install these libraries onto that particular system.

Note Make sure Xcode is installed on to your system. Setting up Xcode for OpenGL. Open up Xcode and click on the Create a new Xcode project option. You will get the following window; fill in the necessary details, as highlighted in the following screenshot:. The Organization Name and Organization identifier properties, you can set to whatever you want.

Next, set the location you would like to store and save the project to. Then, click on the Create button. Before we begin with our code, we need to follow a few more steps necessary to set up our project.

First of all, in Xcode, click on your project and go to Build Settings. Type opengl in the search bar, select OpenGL. Note The arrow is just a shortcut, an alias, and we don't want that. Now go to Cellar , and go to glfw lib.

Select the non-alias libglfw3. Begin by adding some header files to our code:. If you need to develop for more than Windows, OpenGL is the way to go.

If you are going for OpenGL you will have to code everything yourself, find out how to render complex effects like shadows, lights, as well as all game objects. Destiny 2. Should I learn OpenGL ? Is Vulkan difficult? Is OpenGL easy to learn? Is OpenGL still relevant?