Re:Learning Modern OpenGL
by greggman on Thursday May 15, 2014 @12:21AM
(#7747833)
> once upon a time
That's the important point. That one upon a time was invented 23 years ago. It was the wrong model but it took ~15 years to figure out that.
The problem with "beginner mode" is who decides what goes in it? You want what you had 10-15 years ago. Why is that the right level? Maybe it should support 1000 lights instead of 4? But that would require using deferred rendering under the hood. Maybe it should support shadows, oh but which kind as their are 10-15 techniques for shadows each with their own tradeoffs. Maybe you want it to support normal maps, or opacity maps, or specular maps, or glow maps. Maybe it should use physics based lighting because that's far easier for artists.
That's the reason all of that cruft was pulled out. OpenGL is no longer a 3D library. It's a 3D rasterization library. You build a 3D library on top of it. You choose the features you think your beginners need.
If you want your old style immediate mode GL then go use regal (https://github.com/p3/regal). Hopefully people will come out with better ways to start. (like three.js) That old school way is not the best. It was just one of the first. They figured out it was the wrong thing at the OpenGL level and moved on.
I'm happy you're nostalgic about your beginning experiences. People starting out today should start agruably somewhere else though.
> WebGL is pretty cool but in my experience still has some compatibility issues with browsers rendering it
not nearly as many issues as OpenGL because unlike OpenGL, WebGL has conformance tests
That's the important point. That one upon a time was invented 23 years ago. It was the wrong model but it took ~15 years to figure out that.
The problem with "beginner mode" is who decides what goes in it? You want what you had 10-15 years ago. Why is that the right level? Maybe it should support 1000 lights instead of 4? But that would require using deferred rendering under the hood. Maybe it should support shadows, oh but which kind as their are 10-15 techniques for shadows each with their own tradeoffs. Maybe you want it to support normal maps, or opacity maps, or specular maps, or glow maps. Maybe it should use physics based lighting because that's far easier for artists.
That's the reason all of that cruft was pulled out. OpenGL is no longer a 3D library. It's a 3D rasterization library. You build a 3D library on top of it. You choose the features you think your beginners need.
If you want your old style immediate mode GL then go use regal (https://github.com/p3/regal). Hopefully people will come out with better ways to start. (like three.js) That old school way is not the best. It was just one of the first. They figured out it was the wrong thing at the OpenGL level and moved on.
I'm happy you're nostalgic about your beginning experiences. People starting out today should start agruably somewhere else though.
> WebGL is pretty cool but in my experience still has some compatibility issues with browsers rendering it
not nearly as many issues as OpenGL because unlike OpenGL, WebGL has conformance tests
http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/sdk/tests/webgl-confor...