Ok, I have just started learning opengl and have been told (in this forum) to stay away from using the glaux lib. However, the tutorials here (at NEHE) use it -- at least for texture creation/loading which is as far as I''ve gotten. Should I go with this or look a little deeper into other opengl references in order to write my own texture loader? If I should go ahead and use the glaux lib in some cases, what are those and where should I draw the line?

Take a look at the gle32 library. GLaux has a number of problems - my favorite is the flawed display list encapsulation of the primitive objects.

GLUT is top-heavy with a ton of window management stuff - if you're using BCB or MFC, you really don't need any of that.

gle32 contains a well-developed image manipulation library, support for textures, 2 and 3-D fonts, simple, bump-mapped and extruded objects, and much more. It is avalable as a dll or static library; source code included.

[edited by - Ferdinand the Bull on April 22, 2003 11:03:34 AM]

[edited by - Ferdinand the Bull on April 22, 2003 11:04:37 AM]

Ok, so gle32 is an adaptation of the glut library? Or, just uses it. I'm using SDL for my window functionality so I don't need GLUT, besides GLUT is another library I've been warned against. I think I'm going to go ahead and write my own imaging/texturing library if for no other reason than to just do it and learn. Can someone point me to some resources related specifically to opengl's texture related functions...

[edited by - Mage2k on April 22, 2003 11:48:11 AM]

No, gle32 isn't based on GLUT. The extruded stuff is adapted from the gle library included in the GLUT download, but it isn't part of the GLUT library, per se. The image library has its core in Petzold's DIBSection library, but I've extended it quite a bit.

As far as writing your own, if you have the time, go for it. It'd be a good learning experience, no doubt; but it is time-consuming.

[edited by - Ferdinand the Bull on April 22, 2003 12:39:41 PM]

[edited by - Ferdinand the Bull on April 22, 2003 12:40:27 PM]

Go ahead and use glaux since you''re learning. I did that long time ago. I now wrote my own tga loading img library and that''s the way to go. Kinda backwards going if coming from d3d but hey I can now do what I want, freedom, freedom, lala, lala...

Older tutorials use glAux ONLY because at the time they were written, glAUX was used alot, almost to the point where you could say it was a popular library. Since then, the code has changed and no longer uses glAUX, as well, I have posted many alternatives to glAUX.

The use of glAUX in older tutorials is only to simplify bitmap loading and should work without issues for many years to come.

The biggest problem with it these days is that the library is not included with many compilers, so people have to hunt for it. That or they get an error when compiling and don''t know that the error is telling them the library was not found so they get frustrated.