OpenGL is the most popular graphics library in the world; most mobile games use OpenGL and many other applications. In this book, you'll get to learn about the fundamentals that make the awesome games we play and the game engines behind them. A step-by-step process is used to show everything, from setting up OpenGL to its essential modern features. You'll gain a good understanding of the following concepts: setting up on Windows and Mac using GLFW, SDL, and SFML, 2D drawing, 3D drawing, texturing, lighting, 3D rendering, Shaders/GLSL, model loading, and cube mapping.
Learn OpenGL is for anyone and everyone who is interested in creating games, learning how game engines work, and most importantly for anyone who is interested in learning OpenGL. The ideal reader for this book would be anyone with a passion for learning game development or looking out for an OpenGL reference guide. The skills that you'll learn in this book will be applicable to all your game development needs. You'll require a strong foundation in C++ to understand and apply the concepts of this book.
Chapter 1, Setting Up OpenGL, In this chapter, you'll get to learn how to set up OpenGL using various libraries: GLFW, GLEW, SDL, and SFML. We'll learn how to set up our OpenGL projects on Windows and Mac. We also discuss how to link the libraries to your projects using absolute or relative linking, and eventually create the rendering windows to display OpenGL graphics.
Chapter 2, Drawing Shapes and Applying Textures, takes you through drawing various shapes using shaders. We'll begin by drawing a triangle and learn to add color to it. Then, we'll use the triangle concept to draw our quadrilateral and also learn how to add texture to it.
Chapter 3, Transformations, Projections, and Camera, This chapter further builds on the previous chapter. You'll get to grips with applying transformations such as rotation and translation to our shapes, and learn to draw a cube and apply a texture to it. Then, we explore the concepts of projections (perspective and orthographic) and implement those concepts in our game world.
Chapter 4, Effects of lighting, Materials, and Lightmaps, In this chapter we'll learn to apply colors to our objects and how to create a light source such as a lamp in our game world. We'll then look at the effects of light on the objects. You'll understand different types of lighting techniques: ambient, diffused, specular lighting. We'll also explore the various real worl materials and observe the effects of light on the materials. You'll also get to learn about lightmaps in this chapter.
Chapter 5, Types of light sources and combining of lights, This chapter will discuss the different types of light sources such as directional lights, point lights, and spotlights. We'll also learn to combine the lighting effects and the light sources for our game world.
Chapter 6, Implementing a Skybox Using a Cubemap, In this chapter, you'll generate a skybox using a cubemap. You'll learn how to apply textures to the skybox and then create a separate texture file to make loading of textures in the code easier. You'll also learn to draw the skybox and create our game world using it.
Online Chapter, Model Loading, This is a bonus chapter available at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ModelLoading.pdf. In this chapter, you'll learn how to setup Assimp (Open Asset Import Library) on Windows using CMake for all our Model Loading needs. We'll also cover setting up Assimp on Mac OS X and creating a cross-platform Mesh Class. Then we'll explore how to load a 3D model into our game. You'll also get to learn how to create a Model Class to handle loading of our model.
For this book, it's really important that you have a good foundation in C++ as in this book you will be using OpenGL with C++. It's not the easiest thing, OpenGL. If this is your first time coding or you haven't been coding for long, it is recommended you get a good grasp of C++ and then continue with the book.
The illustrations used in this book are for illustrative purposes only. We do not recommend you to misuse these in any way. For more information please consult the terms and conditions of the publishers mentioned here.
Nintendo : https://www.nintendo.com/terms-of-use
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We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/LearnOpenGL_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Extract the library files for GLEW and GLFW in External Libraries folder. "
A block of code is set as follows:
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_CONTEXT_MAJOR_VERSION, 3); SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_CONTEXT_MINOR_VERSION, 3); SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_STENCIL_SIZE, 8);
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_CONTEXT_MAJOR_VERSION, 3);
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_CONTEXT_MINOR_VERSION, 3);
SDL_GL_SetAttribute(SDL_GL_STENCIL_SIZE, 8); Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
brew install glfw3 brew install glew
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Open up Xcode and click on the Create a new Xcode project option."
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