[PD-dev] What should I learn?

[Me]

On Monday, April 14, 2003, at 07:59  PM, Ben Bogart wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I want to write my own OpenGL applications. I want to be able to use 
> all
> the features of the uptodate hardware (Geforce FX and/or Radeon 9700 +)
> under mac OSX AND Linux.
>
> I want to contribute to GEM.
>
> First off If I want to develop on both Linux and OSX, ATI or Nvidia?
> Nvidia seems to have easily downloadable dev kits, whereas ATI seems to
> have links to other opensource projects (like DRI for XFree86) but I
> could not find much on developing for linux using ATI HW.
>
> This may be a bit of a tangent on this list, but I am a devoted GEM 
> user
> and I would like GEM to end up doing everything I find I need to do in
> my own work. I think the best way to do that is contribute to GEM
> whatever code I write for myself. Ideally this code would be
> cross-platform and run on Linux and OSX.
>
> Whats the best place to start and where should I go?
> (Cg? MESA? GLUT? DRI? C++? Objective C? OpenGL for OSX? Cocoa?)

...the best place to start is the "red book", OpenGL Programming guide 
3rd edition;  2nd edition is online, and is good enough to get started 
(up to 1.1)...you can probably start looking around www.opengl.org, and 
of course nehe.gamedev.net has some excellent tutorials (but I think 
they've been converted to cocoa/obj c, which makes familiarity with 
that stuff necessary)...also check out:

http://www.xmission.com/~nate/tutors.html

...these are based on glut, but give a really great view of how the 
calls do their thing...

...and GEM now has the supercool opengl wrappers, so alot of these 
tutorials can be built within pd/gem; unfortunately, there's only one 
example patch, but I'm trying to get into more of a "documentation" 
mode, which is waaaaaaay overdue!

l8r,
jamie