Do a search of this board and maybe the advanced board for the topic “red book”, “blue book” or “OpenGL Super Bible”. I’ve never read the last one but the first 2 are great. The red book is online too, in older versions. If you want some general graphics books, here are some good ones:
Game Programming Gems edited by Mark DeLoura.
Real-Time Rendering by Tomas Moeller and Eric Haines.
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley et al.
Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques by Watt and Watt.
Texturing and Modelling by Ebert et al.
That should keep you busy for a while! They’re in no particular order of importance. Rather, each addresses different areas of 3D graphics that is in itself important. If you had all of them (like I do ), your graphics library would be mostly complete.
ok, ok. I am busy now. I’m taking a look at Jef molo-whatever’s web site right now reading his tutorials. Hey, I did tried looking for the red book, but most of the post was: go searching in your bookstore, go buy it…blah blah.
<sigh> I just couldn’t be bothered typing out the name since everyone knows it as the red book: Woo, M., Neider, J., Davis, T. & Shreiner D. (OpenGL Architecture Review Board) 1999 OpenGL Programming Guide Third Edition: The Official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 1.2, Addison-Wesley, Massachusetts.
See how long it is? It’s called the red book because of the cover (duh!). You can probably look at the cover at Amazon or any other book sellers’ website along with links to the blue book (OpenGL Reference Manual).
Thanks for the info. I’ll keep that in mind. By the way, I have found the “red book” already. The intro was pretty interesting. I guess I will get the book. But just before, what does the book teach or cover? All of OpenGL? Or just partly?If so, what other books can I refer to? Blue book? Thanks.
My suggestion is you learn a liitle more about C++ first. Reading the ‘Thinking in C++’ books vols 1 & 2 is a good start.
Once you know a little more about the language you’ll be able to make the judgment for yourself. If you were using db, you will find C++ a big step, and it can be easy to get disheartened. So learn the basics of C++ first, code structure, objects, librarys, containers, etc…
Tip: Most important, learn about & use the assert command constantly, C++ is not interpreted language and as such debugging can be less helpful during runtime. The assert command goes along way to solving this (when used correctly) and will save you
time and time again.
Ok, I guess you’re right. But I have already bought Sam’s teach yourself C++ in ** days. Can’t I stick to that?
By the way, yeah, moving from DB to C++ is a very big leap. I like DB a lot, but looking back, DB just cannot give me the power which I want. So I turned to C++.
As a side note regarding the APIs: OpenGL is an alternative to Direct3D, not DirectX. Direct3D is part of DirectX, which also features DirectInput, DirectSound, …
If you want an alternative to DirectSound, you might consider OpenAL (although I never managed to get it to work under NT…).
AFAIK, there is no alternative to DirectInput (although you can use straight Win32 API calls as well !) but you can use OpenGL for 3D, OpenAL for sound and DirectInput for controls…
), your graphics library would be mostly complete.