programming

As an author, it's important to me that potential readers of this book know what they are getting in advance, so that they can have all the information they need when deciding whether or not to buy it.

This book is intended for people who have some experience programming in C++ who can make a basic program on their platform of choice. Some knowledge of 3D math will be helpful, though not strictly required.

This book focuses on teaching the portions of OpenGL that are relevant to game development. Topics covered include using OpenGL with Win32, states, primitives, transformations and matrices, color, lighting, materials, blending, fog, images and bitmaps, texture mapping (including mipmapping, multitexturing, combiners, texgen, and environment mapping), extensions, displaying text, display lists, vertex arrays, frustum culling, and buffers. The material is pulled together in a Battle Chess-like example game in the final chapter. The demo programs were written for Windows, but we separated the platform specific code from the OpenGL code, so they should be easily portable to other platforms.

This book started out as a second edition of OpenGL Game Programming, but we decided to split it into two volumes (the second of which will be available next year). If you've already read the original book, you probably don't need this one, though you'll definitely find some useful things in it. We've reviewed everything and corrected many technical errors, as well as updating the text for OpenGL 1.5. Many sections have been completely rewritten, and we've added a new chapter and several new sections. We've also included many of the chapters from the original book on the CD, so at half the price (or less) we think it's a great value.

Additional information about the book, including contact information for Kevin and myself, can be found at glbook.gamedev.net. We're committed to providing continual support for this book, so don't hesitate to contact us.

This book is basically an updated version of "OpenGL Game Programming", with the old chapters on DirectX placed in a CD-ROM. It is definitely for C++ programmers who are unfamiliar with OpenGL. It doesn't focus on intermediate or advanced topics like performance, 3d math, collision detection, etc; it just covers the API. If you want to start learning OpenGL, and would like to use it to quickly make something that you can see, I recommend this book.