Killed a few more trees

Just did my part to kill the worlds trees by buying a 800 pages thick OpenGL book. It arrived yesterday and I just got going to read it in the evening. I skimmed through the pages to get a idea on what it had to offer and it its very comprehensive (<-- thank you spell checker!). Pretty much cover all aspects of OpenGL 3.0-3.1 except the shaders that they have a whole other book on.

The book I'm talking about is OpenGL® Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL®, Versions 3.0 and 3.1, Seventh Edition (Wow, what a title). This book (aka Red book) is strait from the horses mouth and the most respected OpenGL book out there as far as I know. The bad parts of it is that it's quite wordy and I guess that is because they go into every detail as they describe every part of OpenGL. I will read on some more and see if I can get out some real work as I have been promising the last 3 posts :D

Cheers

Change is good

Well as usual I have changed my mind. After a week or so doing some DirectX studying and finally getting to a point where I can make stuff happen on the screen I change my mind. This is so typical and I hate my brain for it but I just can't help it.

I have been researching about different ways of doing the UI for the touch table, reading different papers and so on. And every so often I get some code examples and they are all in OpenGL. That's not enough though to sway me off the wonderful world that is DirectX (Not that wonderful but it's all I know , much like your mom's pancake is the best in the world when you are a kid).

No, the thing that made me drop all that DirectX knowledge that I squeezed into my brain next to all the Mythbusters episodes was the same fact that I fought about when I went with DirectX. It is platform independent. Yes, I still want to be able to run my Omniverse on Linux, OS X and Windows. Not that I plan to support all of the at first but I don't want to port it all. But my second reason was that I actually can use this in my work as a mobile developer since all mobiles with and worth handle OpenGL ES.

So there we have it. Back to the drawing board. Not that big of a setback really since I have learned all the basics of 3D graphics that still apply on OpenGL. So if anyone have any good tutorials on OpenGL 3.0 or later give me a shout (Don't actually shout cause most likely I won't hear it)

Slow progress

I feel that it's been long since last post. My excuse is that I was sick and didn't have the strength to do any Touch-table stuff. But now I'm back. So what am I doing? Well I'm continuing with my DirectX stuff so I can gets some stuff to move on the screen. My new goal is to move some lit 3D cubes with touch by the end of the week.

DirectX is not as hard as I expected but it feels like there is lots of boilerplate that always has to be done to create just the smallest of things. But maybe since I'm just a puppy in the world of 3D programming it feels like I write and write but get nothing done.

As I was sick I spent most my time just in bed dreaming up new and cool way to build this table and still keep it small and energy efficient. So I have some benchmarking to do when I decide on the UI but I hope that the Nvidia ION platform have enough brain capacity to handle the 3D crunching that I need. I have been looking at the Acer ApireRevo that is built on the Nvidia ION and still boost 2GB memory. Really small and little heat generated and the graphics might be good enough since I'm not making a game but a UI. And with Nvidia ION II on the being produced in rumour land It might be good that I take my time to finish this project :)

But really. I will have something to show at the end of the week for sure! :D Youtube here I come :D