There are many impressive games that have been created with OpenGL, such as Doom3, Counter-Strike, various Medal of Honor, Need for Speed and many others. This book will provide you with the basics to start your own OpenGL core projects on Xojo. Watch the video clips below!
OpenGL is one of the few standards for creating a powerful software interface. There is a great deal of reusable code and material on the internet that can be adapted to Xojo. Another resource with free examples is at Alwyn Bester's website at Xojo3D.com.
This book builds a strong foundation on programming graphics. This is an advanced graphics book and it is highly recommended to understand the Xojo programming language first. An intermediate book called "I Wish I Knew How to... Program the Canvas Control with Xojo Desktop" is a good book to study and understand before learning OpenGL. Examples in this book have been created and tested on Windows 10 and OSX El Capitan operating systems. This book is focused on 32-bit programming. Much of the code works with a timer to provide smooth graphics and animation. Below are a few video's of examples that are included in this book. These examples are currently 32-bit.
Here is a short video of the Xojo Blocks program in the OpenGL book, which is Example 20-1.
Another example shows a 3D viewer. This is Example 23-1.
Here is where you can preview the OpenGL-Table of Contents. (about 1-MB)
Examples include:
- Many primitives (quads, triangles, etc.)
- Fundamentals of colours
- Movement and rotation
- Points
- Starting a graph and chart
- Beginning lighting
- Lots of texturing
- Blender models
- Transparency
- Camera viewing
- An introductory understanding of threads
- Collision detection
- Xojo Blocks game
- A first person viewer (no shooting)
- ...and more
There are over 550 pages with 23 chapters and more than 80 example programs with this book.This ebook is pdf formatted and all examples are included as Xojo code. This is one of the many books which can be purchased at Xojo Library.
Why is this book on OpenGL Core? The number of external libraries such as GLUT, GLU, and others have aged over time and with the many upgrades in OpenGL and Xojo, these 32-bit libraries are in need of an update. A few declares have been added for gluLookAt have been implemented because this is the preferred viewer for 3-D dynamic graphics. With 64-bit programs and debugging being developed and released in the near future, the OpenGL core functions should be compatible. Once the libraries (GLUT, GLU, etc.) have been updated to 64-bit then there will be more options for OpenGL graphics. OpenGL in 32-bit mode is very fast with Xojo and is the best way to work with fast and professional graphically based programs, albiet the OpenGL language has a learning curve.
There are a couple (2?) of example programs that currently do not work on OSX because of deprecation. Examples 20-1 and 23-1 that are shown in the above videos have been tested and work on both Windows 10 and OSX Sierra.
OpenGLSurface in Xojo 2016 r3 works with most OpenGL version 1.X commands.
ISBN: 978-1-927924-01-3
It is assumed that you have an intermediate understanding of both Graphics programming and of the Xojo language.
Version 2.0 - Released in November 2016
Version 2.1 - Released in December 2016
- Fixed DrawString example 16-3 to work with Xojo 2016 r4
Version 2.2 - Released in January 2017
- Added GL_MULT Blurring Example 24-01
- Added GL_ACCUM Blurring Example 24-02
- Added Will Shanks code to make glAccum Work on OSX
Version 2.3 - Released October 2018
- Modified Example 16-3 to be compatible with New Picture format (Thank you to Prof. Ramon Sastre). See Feedback 53484.
