If you want to use any type of off screen rendering process, then frame buffers are probably the go for you. They allow you to render an entire scene, directly to a texture.
OpenGL
If you want to use any type of off screen rendering process, then frame buffers are probably the go for you. They allow you to render an entire scene, directly to a texture.
Here is a collection of tips for using OpenGL that I have started compiling, expect it to grow :)
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The OpenGL drivers can be tricky for some people to find, and whilst I recommend using GLEW and FreeGLUT, feel free to download these files, although they may be out of date.
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Vertex Buffer Objects are used to store vertices, their indices and other information on the graphics card, for OpenGL to access directly. They are extremely fast and effecient, and are meant to supersede Display Lists. So lets use them for our terrain!
If you want to create a game like Sim City, or an RPG, then you are going to need some sort of tiling engine. This breaks up the ground into a bunch of known images and places them on runtim. This saves us having extremely large image files for an entire map and also makes it customizable in-game.
While OpenGL is built for 3D rendering, it does also support 2D. This is where you want orthogonal projections, which are perfect for a Heads Up Display, or a menu system.
Textures by themselves are perfectly fine, you don't have to do anything with them. But have you ever wanted to load a movie into a 3D scene? Maybe you want to read a movie file, and display it on a quad moving around your scene. Well you can, but you have to do it frame, by frame.
Lets face it, particles are ALOT of fun. Whether you want to create a weather system, some awesome fire, or just throw a million objects around randomly, they are both stimulating in a game, and fun.
While GLUT provides a sphere for us to draw, that sphere does not contain texture coordinates. In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own sphere, which has texture coordinates included. Now you can make that solar system demo you have always wanted!
Circles are one of the few shapes that are not default in OpenGL, but the good news is, they are easily created using lines. In this tutorial, I will show you how to draw a nice, round, circle.