OpenGL Celebrates Its 30th Birthday

[Clive McCarthy]

The design & construction of stable systems is as close as I get to art. I guess trade craft is a better word for it. You might be principally concerned with what's on the canvas/screen, but I'm at least as interested in what's behind the curtain.

I watched a video recently of several art restorers looking at a work by Matisse. It was both fascinating and awful to see the level of detail they were concerned with. I imagine it would have made Matisse laugh. Though VERY unlikely, it amuses me that, at some distant time, someone might pour over my code and go ooh and ahh, at the way I write.

I am going to make my code open source. I have started a fork. It will needs lots of documentation to make it useful to anyone else because it has no user interface at all. I build and run the code from within my IDE. Only when I have a finished a work do I transfer an executable to artwork computer.

[coder]

I watched a video recently of several art restorers looking at a work by Matisse.

Did you see the documentary on reverse-engineering Vermeer's technique? I've only seen a trailer, but it looks pretty interesting.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/

it amuses me that, at some distant time, someone might pour over my code and go ooh and ahh, at the way I write.

I don't know, but I learned assembly language programming partially by reading through some source code to a demo or intro that I found on a BBS, in the mid-1990's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

Perhaps someone whose seen your work will at least examine your code enough to understand certain techniques.

I am going to make my code open source. I have started a fork. It will needs lots of documentation to make it useful to anyone else

I wonder if there might be enough common themes in generative art for an open source library to get established and gain some momentum. Perhaps some of your code could live on, in such a project.

I believe the most useful thing developers can provide is documentation. Without it, even some of the best-written code can go unnoticed and get forgotten. To that end, you might consider writing some blog posts explaining some of your techniques and highlighting parts of the implementation. Or not. It's obviously a very personal decision, but it could draw more attention to your code and your work, especially by those who don't run in art circles.

[arQon]

Which edition? I have 9th edition, but I haven't used it much.

9th?! Wow. Mine's 2nd, and it was a replacement for a copy someone at work borrowed and never returned.
How on earth did it go through all those extra editions? Did they merge it with the orange book (GLSL) and include 2.0 (and then 3.0) or something like that?

[Clive McCarthy]

Did you see the documentary on reverse-engineering Vermeer's technique? I've only seen a trailer, but it looks pretty interesting.

I think some of the Vermeer reconstruction experiments were started because of David Hockney's thoughts on the early use of lenses.

[coder]

9th?! Wow. Mine's 2nd, and it was a replacement for a copy someone at work borrowed and never returned.
How on earth did it go through all those extra editions?

Well, OpenGL changed a heck of a lot, over the years. It breaks down into 3 distinct epochs. 1.x, 2.x, and 3.x. I wasn't following it at the time, but I have no idea why they jumped the version number to 4.0 instead of continuing on with the 3.x numbering, because 4.x seems a continuation of the 3.x epoch.

As for the book, here's a version history of the OpenGL Programming Guide, based on some ebay searches I did. Helpfully, the book covers all indicate the OpenGL version and ebay listings automatically include the ISBN details, which include publication date.

Edition	Publication	OpenGL Version
1	1993	1.0
2	1997	1.1
3	1999	1.2
4	2003	1.4
5	2005	2.0
6	2007	2.1
7	2009	3.1
8	2013	4.3
9	2016	4.5

If you were to work in modern OpenGL code, only 7th Edition and newer would be of any use. Too much was changed in OpenGL 3.0. 9th Edition is still the latest, though OpenGL 4.6 was released in 2017. That was mostly a maintenance release, IIRC.

To see a summary of the changes between OpenGL versions, check out the wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL#Version_history

[coder]

BTW, if you buy these books on InformIT.com, they have bundle deals on the print + eBook. Their ebooks are available as unencrypted PDF files that exactly match the print edition, which means all the diagrams, code snippets, and figures render perfectly. Plus, it's searchable and (IIRC) you can copy-paste from it.

https://www.informit.com/store/opengl-programming-guide-the-official-guide-to-learning-9780134495491

[arQon]

here's ... some ebay searches I did.

Thanks.

To be clear, when I said *why* it was a replacement I meant "not because the language had changed enough that I needed a newer copy".
Don't get me wrong though: a couple of the extensions that came shortly afterwards were *incredibly* important - but those few extensions that did matter (CVA and MT, which are indeed missing from my copy) could be covered in just a handful of extra pages kept with the book.

I don't remember if the jump from 3.3 to 4.0 was meaningful or just marketing either, so I wouldn't worry about it. I expect it was a breaking change along the lines of "No guarantee that compatibility mode is implemented", or something like that.

[coder]

I don't remember if the jump from 3.3 to 4.0 was meaningful or just marketing either, so I wouldn't worry about it. I expect it was a breaking change along the lines of "No guarantee that compatibility mode is implemented", or something like that.

The wikipedia page mentioned that 4.0 was released at the same time as 3.3, but that 4.0 had DX11-equivalent functionality. So, because I guess they wanted to do a minor follow-on to 3.2, and 4.0 had tessellation and lots of optional extensions, they probably thought it would be less confusing to fork it as a new major revision.