[flafla2]

To clarify, the point of Scotty3D is not to teach OpenGL -- the students do not write any OpenGL, DirectX, Vulkan, etc in the class. The OpenGL that is there is simply used to render the 3D models and the UI, so updating that code is pretty low priority.

One of my longer-term goals as a TA for the class is to update Scotty3D to Vulkan or modern OpenGL.

EDIT: I wanted to expand on this point, as this is actually an important part of the philosophy of the design of the course. As the OP argues as well, it more important to learn the fundamentals of CG theory (eg rasterization, the rendering equation, solving ODEs/PDEs) than the specifics of any particular implementation (OGL, DX, etc). After taking 462, many students (including myself!) take the class 15-466 Computer Game Programing [0], which goes deep into more modern OpenGL implementations (admittedly, it's OGL 3.3, but it still covers shaders/VBOs/other important concepts that translate to modern APIs).

[0] http://graphics.cs.cmu.edu/courses/15-466-f18/

[pfranz]

I wanted to support what you're saying. I've worked in visual effects for over a decade now. While I've dabbled with OpenGL, I think the only practical application I've had was taking a stab at writing a PyOpenGL widget for viewing Alembic models in a custom PySide asset browser for a studio. This was when Alembic was much less mature and it never ended up getting used. However, I have done a lot of dealing with color spaces, debugging/optimizing scanline and ray casting renderers, computing/storing surface normals, projection and other space transforms, and simulations. I've written toy versions of a lot of those things, but mostly was debugging back box systems written by others or troubleshooting assets generated or consumed by one of these tools.

Even if you're talking about game engines, there's still a whole lot more to learn. This game engine book [1] has one chapter about the rendering engine and 16 more about other topics. Each chapter in there is at least one hefty book to get a good working knowledge of the topic.

It's great you have a resource where people can learn and experiment with these other things without having to learn to write all the code around it.

[1] https://www.gameenginebook.com/toc.html

[pjmlp]

> Even if you're talking about game engines, there's still a whole lot more to learn. This game engine book [1] has one chapter about the rendering engine and 16 more about other topics. Each chapter in there is at least one hefty book to get a good working knowledge of the topic.

Which is why when people without game industry experience start discussing 3D APIs adoption, they loose on how little the APIs actually influence the whole engine codebase.