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tommai78101 / InitializingOpenGL

A book written in my own spare time, that has notes on how to begin an OpenGL project.
MIT License
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Initializing OpenGL: A Sadistic Approach to Modern OpenGL

A book written in my own spare time, that has notes on how to begin an OpenGL project. The main goal of writing this book, is so a complete beginner can follow along and learn as much as they can with a ton of information as possible. And it is because of this goal, I need to cite a lot of references and do research to make sure the information I got is accurately represented to the readers. And it will take a while to complete each chapter.

OpenGL versions Goals
1.X, 2.X, 3.2+, 4.X Initialization only
3.1 Outlier OpenGL support
any Depends on book progress
4.6 End goal

Currently, the book is not done, but I am releasing an "alpha" version of the book. It's provided both as a DOCX file, and a PDF file for viewing pleasures. This is a reward for you searching and lurking on Github, or that somehow this book was found by a search engine, and you just so happened to see this book appearing in the search results. And thus, it is why this book is secretly hidden away online.

DOCX file must embed system fonts for compatibilty with Windows, MacOS X, and Ubuntu/Linux.

Scroll on down to see the future roadmap. Table of Contents will be updated whenever new contents are added to the draft.

Table of Contents

PREFACE ........................................................................... 1 
CHAPTER 1 ......................................................................... 3 
    Installation .............................................................. 4 
    Picking Your Poison ....................................................... 5 
    Development Setup ......................................................... 6 
CHAPTER 2 ........................................................................ 11
    Choosing an OpenGL Version ............................................... 12
        Drawbacks of Very Old OpenGL Versions ............................ 13
        Consider the Not-So-Old OpenGL Versions .......................... 15
        Summarized OpenGL Initialization Steps ........................... 17
    Creation of a Window ..................................................... 18
        Using the WinMain() Entry Point .................................. 19
        Using the Main() Entry Point ..................................... 21
    A Dummy OpenGL Context ................................................... 23
        The Pixel Format Descriptor ...................................... 24
        Understanding Pixel Formats ...................................... 27
        Choosing and Setting a Pixel Format .............................. 31
    Initialization of OpenGL ................................................. 34
        Introduction to Loading Libraries ................................ 34
        Modularizing our Entry Points .................................... 36
    Hybrid Graphics Support .................................................. 37
        Brief History of Intel Integrated Graphics ....................... 37
        Handling the Consequences of Dual Graphics ....................... 39
    Summary .................................................................. 46
        Full Source Code (Including Notes) ............................... 46

REFERENCES ....................................................................... 58 

APPENDIX ......................................................................... 62 
    A Hungarian Notation Trick ................................................ i 
    Documented Quirks ........................................................ iv 
        ShowWindow Getting Ignored on First Invocation ................... iv 
        The “sprintf” History ............................................. v 
    Byte Ordering (Part 1/3) ............................................... viii 
    A Unicode Primer (Part 2/3)................................................ x 
        What is Unicode? ................................................. xi 
        UCS-2 ............................................................ xi 
        UTF-16 ........................................................... xi 
        UCS-4 and UTF-32 ................................................. xv 
        UTF-1 ........................................................... xvi 
        UTF-8 ............................................................ xx 
        What is next? ..................................................xxiii 
    Applying Unicode (Part 3/3) ............................................ xxiv 
        Making Common Functions ........................................ xxiv 
        Converting UTF-16 to UTF-8 .................................... xxvii 
        Converting UTF-8 to UTF-16 ..................................... xxxv 
        Converting UTF-32 to UTF-8 ...................................... xli 
        Converting UTF-8 to UTF-32 ..................................... xliv 
        Converting UTF-32 to UTF-16 .................................... xlix 
        Converting UTF-16 to UTF-32 ..................................... liv

Roadmap

(Updated: January 1, 2019 - Included scheduling conflicts with real-life into the timeline.)
(Updated: March 20, 2019 - Adjusting schedule to update the book only on weekends.)
(Updated: August 4, 2019 - Finished Triangle/Hexagon OpenGL back in July, was about to write book, but real life got in the way.)

Timeline Topic of Interests Estimated page counts
November 8, 2018 ~ November 26, 2018 Personal Vacation Trip N/A
November 28, 2018 ~ December 10, 2018 Finish the Appendix (Postponed) 10
January 28, 2019 ~ February 24, 2019 Finish the Appendix 10
February 9, 2019 ~ February 24, 2019 Feedback Phase N/A
February 25, 2019 ~ March 1, 2019 Do tax returns (Time may change!) N/A
March 1, 2019 ~ March 17, 2019 Rewrite "Initialization of OpenGL" in Chapter 2 5
March 1, 2019 ~ April 1, 2019 Continue creating OpenGL context 10
May 2019 ~ July 2019 Get triangle showing up 15
August 2019 ~ October 2019 Boilerplate code in C and C++ (Delayed) 25
August 5, 2019 ~ TBD Real Life Takes Over N/A
Future Depends on Issues/Feedback/Real Life N/A
Estimated final total pages count (not including Appendix) Current total pages count (not including Appendix)
110 57

Sneak Peek

This is what I planned to add to Chapter 3 before something happened in real life:

How to Contribute

I welcome those who contribute by reporting an Issue. Those who do, will be listed as a co-author.

Just state the summary of the topic and list out what you wished to read about. If possible, if you have resources and research materials provided in the Issue report, I'll gladly do my best to get all the details in.

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MIT Licensed.