In light of an external hard drive crash costing me the uncommitted changes to my OpenGL engine (not GL-Zelda, but the personal project I've been working on), I've decided to start playing around with Direct3D again. More importantly, the custom theme I've got going with Visual Studio is sexy, and I wanted to show it off. :3

The GL-Zelda tutorials will be kicking back up after I move to Arizona in about a week.

The ZFGC IRC channel is back!

For users interested in connecting, point your IRC clients (I recommend mIRC for Windows, irssi for Linux, or Linkinus for Mac OS X). If you're not interested in downloading a client, you can connect through Mibbit to join in.

IRC Server: irc.kbfail.net
Channel: #ZFGC
Ports: 6667, 7000
SSL Port: 6697

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Bear in mind, the chatroom's been dead for the past couple of years, so it will take time for the activity to pick back up. Currently, we've left the previous channel operators in place. Some of them are users who haven't been around the forums for a while -- I'm hoping to pull a couple users back into the fold. If anybody has any issues on the channel and an operator isn't present, send a copy of the chat log to gm112 or I and we'll make sure it's taken care of.

i know our game does not look as good as the games today..

Which is the reason that people will take issue with the system requirements. The only thing that I'm trying to say is that you need to find what areas in your code or assets are causing these bottlenecks, because the majority of users here aren't going to have a machine strong enough to run the game well. I'm noticing that the rasterization seems to be the slowest portion of the project (still running at ~15ms) - which is, really, to be expected. But given that you don't have Anti-Aliasing and that the contents of the scenes you've presented look simple enough that it should not be having these problems.

And once again, your game should not require the resources of a AAA title in order to run - and optimization is the developers' responsibility. Saying that users who want to run "new games" these days need a powerful gaming computer does not apply to your project.

On a lighter note, it does look great, and it's awesome to see fan projects in this community start stepping into the third dimension.

Tiled importer complete - my task now is to convert the system to use the programmable pipeline, then optimize the hell out of the mapping system. <_<

I suppose it is a good idea to teach using the fixed-function pipeline first, as it mainly teaches concepts (though I didn't really understand most of them until I started learning about shaders).

That's how things generally work with any library that hides the details behind pretty ease-of-use features - SDL's surfaces, for example, help to teach newer programmers about the importance of graphics buffers - but doesn't explain all that much beyond the general scope.

I feel like I'm bothering you asking all of these questions ^_^' lol

No problem at all - I'm always happy to see interest in things I'm working on.

but what for audio? OpenAL? Looking at the lastest OpenAL, it looks exactly like OpenGL 3.0+, but I don't know much about how audio works, never got that far in making a game.

I'm still trying to decide between using Audiere, SDL_audio and OpenAL. I prefer working with FMOD, but the size of it is a little overboard for the series. Ultimately it'll probably come down to the ease with which it can be packaged for multi-platform use.

I don't meet much nice people who are experts at game programming.

Believe me, I'm no expert - programming is just something I enjoy doing, and graphics programming has been the area I've been focusing on learning most recently. Writing these tutorials helps me as much (possibly even more) as the tutorials themselves help new developers. It's the same philosophy I had when training new Marines when they got to my unit - as I taught them, I had them focus increasingly on teaching others, which helped to solidify their understanding of the subject (in that case, network architecture and Cisco hardware).

So will you only cover Xcode and Visual Studio?

No, I intend to add coverage for Code::Blocks and potentially KDevelop at a later point -- unfortunately, I'm sitting on a Satellite internet connection until mid-April, so I'm holding off on installing a Linux partition on any of my machines.

Also, do you plan to release these as a book eventually?

As a hard-copy, not likely. Jonathan Harbour had run into problems with Nintendo when he had tried publishing a book on homebrew development for the Gameboy Advance system, and I know I'll have less luck with a book on developing fan games. If the response to this series is positive enough, I may consider doing so in the future.

Reading PDFs in web browsers are annoying, I would prefer just reading it on a website.

Unfortunately, I feel that discussion boards are ill-suited for formatting tutorials. Normally I had posted tutorials on my blog, but since dropping my Linode and pointing my domain to Tumblr, that's not as nice an option at the moment. With the new system for ZFGC, we're planning to add enhanced support for all resource types, including tutorials - and I plan to port the tutorials to that article system as well.

I also notice you're using SDL for window creation. I myself consider SDL to be bloated for just for that purpose, I would rather use something like GLFW. Does this mean you're going to be using SDL_image for texture loading?

I'm going to be honest, I'd never even heard of GLFW (though it certainly seems to be a decent library). Usually, I prefer to implement the application layer myself (I've got a bit of a Direct3D background, so Win32 is no stranger to me - though I'm not as familiar with Cocoa or X), but SDL provides a lot of things that were appealing to me in the context of this series:

1) It's easy for new developers to wrap their minds around. This is probably the most important thing to me, as new developers are my target audience.
2) Although I don't use it for most personal projects anymore (Horus being the exception, but that engine's largely focused on being a testing ground for things before they go into GL-Zelda), I do have some familiarity with SDL.
3) Most importantly, SDL provides a uniform method for handling a large subset of tasks - loading images, loading/playing audio, etc. Looking over GLFW, it's deprecated its texture loading features, and similarly has no support for audio. Unfortunately, covering the setup of DevIL (my image library of choice) and other libraries in a cross-platform manner is a little cumbersome for new developers.

SDL may have feature bloat, but it isn't so bad as to cause any problems. Its uniformity with API calls and ease of adding plugins (Such as, yes, SDL_image) ultimately won out as the best choice for teaching new developers.

I see no problem with re-enabling the change of display names. Give me a second to find where the option's at.

Edit: Done.

Chapters 1 & 2 of Learning OpenGL through Fan Game Development focus on project setup, conveying the initial game concept, and establishing our project in Xcode 4 and Visual Studio 2010. We will begin building the game as of Chapter 3, where we establish SDL and begin working in a platform-independent manner (where Chapter 2 is largely platform-specific).

PDF Download (Approx. 2.7 MB)
iBooks Download (Approx 9 MB)

EDIT:
Just as a quick note, I didn't actually include linking the SDL lib in the Visual Studio build because that is intended for the next tutorial (as I will also be adding SDLmain, which is handled via lib in VS2010).

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Chapters 1 & 2 have been released!

I'm releasing this series in both iBooks and PDF format - if anybody could please test the iBooks version, it would be appreciated. I understand that the majority of the pictures are not present in the PDF version, but please bear in mind that they should be unimportant (the document would be flooded with them if I'd put them in as images instead of galleries) to completing the tutorial, and that future images will only be related to showing in-book shots of the effects being achieved (meaning iBooks users will get more preview images, but there will be no difference beyond that).

However, if users desire all of the images for PDF copies (for these chapters - I'm not going to bother with including extra previews through the rest of the tutorial), I will consider a re-release for PDF copies.

Doesn't mean you can't use it. ;3

Still, nice.

The OpenGL tutorials I'm writing use SDL 1.2 as the windowing system (I'd have gone with 2.0, but my Mac doesn't even support OpenGL 3, so it'd be pointless). You should take a look at them as they start coming out (working on finishing up the first right now). :3

Just as a note, though - if you're using SDL_image for loading the PNGs, you shouldn't have to worry about setting a color key. If I recall correctly, it'll automatically use the alpha transparency in the PNG file (don't quote me on this, though - I haven't actually used SDL for rendering in ages).

That's it, I'm ordering an assassination. -_-;;;