I’ve now put in a rather large amount of work on the underpinnings of the game, but have essentially nothing to show for it. To ensure I have the motivation to continue with this project, I have once again resumed my efforts of learning OpenGL. I figured if I could see some part of a virtual world on the screen then I would be instantly motivated to keep plowing along. To that end, I have started reading OpenGL Programming Guide: The official Guide to Learning OpenGL, Version 4.3 (8th Edition). Amazingly, even though the title of the book is crazy long, the book itself is even longer. It’s a monster 984 page tome that covers basically the entire OpenGL API.
It’s a serious undertaking to plan to read a book of this size cover to cover, but as a 3D graphics noob, I need everything it can offer me. I’m presently something like 165 pages in and I’ve learned a lot so far, but I’m having some trouble because I feel like the order the information is presented in needs a bit of help and the book needs an editor pretty badly. Shortcomings of the book aside, I have a long way to go on my reading. Sorry this post isn’t especially interesting, but it has been a lot of reading and studying and trying to internalize hundreds of very dense pages of a book. Hopefully in the future I’ll learn enough to get something on the screen and my posts will start including screen shots.