How to set up opengl

i am completely new w/ opengl and i have no clue where to start. I need someone to help me and tell me what to do. Websites, compilers, or anythign will help thansk

Hi, best place to start learning OpenGL is nehe.gamedev.net The first tutorial gets you set up in windows. If your not programming in windows then the first tutorial wont do you any good but, there are ports of each tutorial for other platforms.

Old GLman

http://hem.passagen.se/opengl/getstarted/ - For compilers, editors, drivers, links etc.
http://hem.passagen.se/opengl/tutorials/ - For basic OpenGL code.

…then you can continue with more advanced tutorials.
http://nehe.gamedev.net/ http://www.gametutorials.com/
etc.

Hi !

If you are using Windows and don’t know much about the Win32 API then using GLUT would be a good choice, this makes it very easy to get started, it comes with example code and so on.

If you do know the Win32 API, then the NeHe tutorials would be a good choice.

Anyway you can always do a search on google for “opengl tutorial” and you will end up with plenty of hits.

You will find links to it on www.opengl.org

Mikael

thanks everyone for your help… and someone mentioned somethign about GLUT… what exactly is that and what does it do thnx

Originally posted by bla1234:
thanks everyone for your help… and someone mentioned somethign about GLUT… what exactly is that and what does it do thnx
GLUT is a nice utility library that wraps up the nasty details of window creation, OpenGL context creation and message handling. The first hit on this google search directly leads to the win32 version libs, headers and docs ready to go

cool thanks a lot. OK now i was on IRC and they say i need to learn c or c++. so i will but which one would be bettter for liek video game graphics and stuff. my neighbor nows c++ and i have some books so that will help but thanks again

c++ is a superset of c, if you learn c++ you must have learned c. The difference is that c++ has features that help support object oriented programming. This can be slightly slower than heavily optimized c code, but is much easier to read and add onto.

For questions about OpenGL toolkits (such as GLUT), see the toolkits forum here at opengl.org.

A toolkit basically takes care of much important (and boring) stuff that OpenGL itself cannot handle (such as window management etc).

GLUT, GLFW and CPW are examples of OpenGL toolkits. Which one to chose depends on your needs (I suggest reading the documentation for all these toolkits to get a feel for what they do - then you can chose).

GLUT
GLFW
CPW

Just a note: C does have some small functionality that is not available in C++