c++ - Learning modern OpenGL

Question

I am aware that there were similar questions in past few years, but after doing some researches I still can't decide where from and what should I learn. I would also like to see your current, actual view on modern OpenGL programming with more C++ OOP and shader approach. And get sure that my actual understanding on some things is valid.

So... currently we have OpenGL 4.2 out, which as I read somewhere requires dx11 hardware (what does it mean?) and set of 'side' libraries, to for example create window.

There is the most common GLUT, which I extremely hate. One of main reason are function calls, which doesn't allow freedom in the way how we create main loop. As some people were telling, it was not meant for games.

There is also GLFW, which actually is quite nice and straight-forward to me. For some reason people use it with GLUT. ( which provides not only window initialisation, but also other utilities? )

And there is also SFML and SDL ( SDL < SFML imo ), whereas both of them sometimes need strange approach to work with OGL and in some cases are not really fast.

And we have also GLEW, which is extension loading utility... wait... isn't GLUT/GLFW already an extension? Is there any reason to use it, like are there any really important extensions to get interested with?

Untill now we have window creation (and some utilities), but... OGL doesn't take care of loading textures, neither 3D models. How many other libs do I need?

Let's mention education part now. There is (in)famous NeHe tutorial. Written in C with use of WinApi, with extremely unclear code and outdated solutions, yet still the most popular one. Some stuff like Red Book can be found, which are related to versions like 2.x or 3.x, however there are just few (and unfinished) tutorials mentioning 4.x.

What to go with?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8733663/learning-modern-opengl

Answer 1

If you are writing a game, I would avoid things like GLUT, and write your own wrappers that will make the most sense for your game rendering architecture.

I would also avoid OpenGL 4.2 at this point, unless you only want to target specific hardware on specific platforms, because support is minimal. i.e., the latest version of Mac OSX Lion just added support for OpenGL 3.2.

For the most comprehensive coverage of machines made in the last few years, build your framework around OpenGL 2.1 and add additional support for newer OpenGL features where they make sense. The overall design should be the same. If you're only interested in targeting "current" machines, i.e. machines from late 2011 and forward, build your framework around OpenGL 3. Only the newest hardware supports 4.2, and only on Windows and some Linux. If you're interested in targeting mobile devices and consoles, use OpenGL ES 2.0.

GLEW loads and manages OpenGL Extensions, which are hardware extensions from different vendors, as opposed to GLUT which is a toolkit for building OpenGL applications, completely different things. I would highly recommend using GLEW, as it will provide a clean mechanism for determining which features are available on the hardware it is being run on, and will free you from the task of having to manually assign function pointers to the appropriate functions.

OpenGL SuperBible is a pretty good book, also check OpenGL Shading Language. Everything you do with modern OpenGL is going to involve the use of shaders - no more fixed functionality - so your biggest challenge is going to be understanding GLSL and how the shader pipelines work.