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by latch 5471 days ago
As if Glide never existed

In all seriousness, I did 1 graphics programming course back in the day, and it was pretty insane. This was all in OpenGL. The amount of code required to draw the simplest scene was massive. I seem to remember there's a built-in teapot primitive, and I ended up just using that to construct everything (yes, there are simpler built-in primitives, but none nearly as cool as a teapot). I didn't do very well in that course.
3 comments
megrimlock 5471 days ago
The space of OpenGL programs that fail to produce anything visible onscreen is surprisingly vast.
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JonnieCache 5471 days ago
This was my experience during my brief foray into graphics programming at uni. I remember failing a lot, thinking "this can't be me, somebody else somewhere is doing it wrong" and abandoning it in lieu of something more productive.
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jordan0day 5471 days ago
My first 3D graphics course in college was the same story. You go in thinking you're going to learn to make "Crysis", and you're lucky to leave with a texture-mapped plane. In fact, we probably didn't write a line of code for the first month, we instead spent all our time deriving the mathematics involved in 3D graphics.

As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons on HTML and CSS, you learn to write a web server and a web browser.

That said, in retrospect, I'm glad we learned those things. If they would have just turned us loose with Ogre (http://www.ogre3d.org/) or something, no one would have spent the time going back to actually learn how 3D graphics really works.

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gabbo 5471 days ago
> As an analogy, it's like taking a "basics of the web" course, and instead of the expected lessons on HTML and CSS, you learn to write a web server and a web browser.

Funny you mention this - when I was an undergrad, the first complex group project in my EE/CE curriculum (second year; first year was all individual) had us building a web server.

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daeken 5471 days ago
OpenGL doesn't have a teapot primitive -- common misconception. GLUT (the OpenGL utility toolkit) provides glut[Solid/Wire]Teapot for convenience, but that's by no means core OpenGL; it just backends to a bunch of quads.
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marshray 5471 days ago
True, but without GLUT or an equivalent utility library (hit or miss) you're writing even more scaffolding code. Much more.
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