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Latest posts (page 2)

Useful Basics to Know When Using OpenGL

Long explanations of history and internals would put you to sleep, so I'd rather skip them, but these are the parts I stumbled over badly while teaching myself, so I think I have to explain them. I'll still do my best to keep it short. You don't need to understand everything, but it's good to know the big picture, so I've collected it here in part 1. Skimming it the first time is fine. Your understanding of OpenGL should deepen as you move on to the later articles, so come back and read it again then.

Setting Up Visual Studio for OpenGL

In these lessons, I'll explain OpenGL so that even people touching it for the first time can follow along. The target level is someone who has written a little C. The series is about OpenGL 2.1, but I'll avoid the old features as much as possible so that what you learn is easy to apply to newer versions such as OpenGL 3.x and 4.x. Why OpenGL 2.1? Because many PCs don't support the newer versions of OpenGL. If you release software you've made, you want as many people as possible to use it, and in those cases you often have to use an older OpenGL. For example, Clip Studio Paint, the most famous illustration software, appears to use OpenGL 2.1, and Live2D appears to use OpenGL 3.3. Even commercial software deliberately uses OpenGL versions that aren't the latest.

Installing Visual Studio Community 2017

Since I'm about to write a series of tutorial articles, I figured I'd take the opportunity to install the newly released Visual Studio Community 2017. It isn't difficult, but it might come in handy, so I'll walk through it as carefully as I can while keeping it brief. (In other words, a perfectly ordinary walkthrough.)