re-learning opengl

Question

10 years ago I did some game programming and used OpenGL for the 3d graphics part. It was not really great stuff, just some script kiddies attempts to make a game :-)

Now I need to visualize a scene for testing image processing algorithms. I wondered: What changed in these 10 years? (I guess a lot?) Is NeHe still a good source or is it out of date? Are there good resources to close the gap?

Thanks!

Answer 1

NeHe is in the process of writing new tutorials. Some of the things you may have been used to 10 years ago have been more or less abandoned (compatibility profiles are still around, but they're deprecated) in moving to a fully-programmable pipeline and more efficient primitives.

For example, passing vertices between glBegin()/glEnd() is being left behind in favor of vertex buffer objects and vertex arrays. The old transform and lighting model is going away in favor of fragment shaders.

I'd suggest starting with Joe Groff's intro to modern OpenGL, and get a copy of The OpenGL SuperBible, 5th edition, which covers all of the new ways of doing things.

Answer 2

The biggest changes will be around the use of shaders for everything. Though if you just want to create simple scenes you don't need to use them.

Edit: Having just got the OpenGL SuperBible 5th Edition, I can also echo greyfade's recommendation - this is a really good introduction to the new stuff.

Answer 3

There are new versions of OpenGL out these days (we're up to OpenGL 4 now), but all the stuff you did back then will still work. Unless you're doing something especially complicated, you probably won't need to do much to close the gap -- although you might still want to.