I would sugest making the tutorials crossplatform. It isn't that hard, since OpenGL is mostly crossplatform. There is no need for all those ports that only differ in the initialization code.

[Edited by - Andrew Russell on March 27, 2006 9:41:47 AM]

Just going over a few more points:

- On the "code dump" situation. I agree this could be fixed up, but the per-line commentary and overall annotation is still useful and we don't want to get rid of it. I've come up with some ideas about how to compromise between the two - for example - we could have a full, annotated source listing that is separate from the tutorial itself.

- We should take advantage of "web stuff". For example - having links between the tutorial and the annotated source. We could also use &#106avascript to have a "what does this line mean" pop-up to replace the over-commenting problem of existing NeHe source.

- I think this could be implemented really easily with a system similar to Doxygen. Where the source-annotation is done using "magic comments" that can used when generating a HTML document, and stripped out when creating a "code library" (yet still compilable as-is for rapid testing). I'm a busy guy, so the less time I have to spend manually synchronizing things and writing HTML the better.

- This also works very nicely with the idea of abstraction and makes it easy to generate a "code library", as has been mentioned.

- New tutorial material - I'm thrilled to receive any (well written) new articles and new tutorials for the site. But I'm not going to leap out and write any myself at present (too busy, and the other stuff has a higher priority).

- Cross Platform: Because I want to use abstraction and such, hopefully I can make it so that "Tutorial 1" can have a drop-in replacement for each different operating system, without affecting later tutorials.

- Also, I'm thinking about different ways of organising tutorials, rather than just a linear list. Maybe some kind of graph - for example - with separate "Tutorial 1" for each OS, and "side" tutorials (like that 7-becomes-6b thing that lc_overlord mentioned). This is something I'll probably look into later - I'll be starting with Tutorial 1 and seeing how things go from there.

- I'm thinking I might put up alpha/beta versions of tutorials, so that you guys can check them out (peer-review style) before they go "live".

Quote: Original post by Andrew Russell
- Cross Platform: Because I want to use abstraction and such, hopefully I can make it so that "Tutorial 1" can have a drop-in replacement for each different operating system, without affecting later tutorials.

I think we should invest some time into devising a tutorial-framework. Consistent file naming and such would be usefull too. It would be nice if the tutorials would add up to a simple library, which could be use for experimenting. What I mean is for example the particle engine tutorial could have functions to create, manage and render particle effects with a sepparated demo function, instead of mixing the initialazation of the particle engine with the OpenGL init and rendering with the managment. So that using it outside the tutorial would be much easier. Maybe I should rewrite a tutorial or two to demonstrate what I mean.

Quote:
- I'm thinking I might put up alpha/beta versions of tutorials, so that you guys can check them out (peer-review style) before they go "live".

thats definitly a good idea.

Quote: Original post by nefthy
I think we should invest some time into devising a tutorial-framework. Consistent file naming and such would be usefull too. It would be nice if the tutorials would add up to a simple library, which could be use for experimenting. What I mean is for example the particle engine tutorial could have functions to create, manage and render particle effects with a sepparated demo function, instead of mixing the initialazation of the particle engine with the OpenGL init and rendering with the managment. So that using it outside the tutorial would be much easier. Maybe I should rewrite a tutorial or two to demonstrate what I mean.

Don't worry, this is almost exactly what I had in mind [wink].

[Edited by - Andrew Russell on March 22, 2006 7:14:34 AM]

Along the lines of the tutorial framework mentioned, I think that since the tutorials are contributed by a range of authors it would also be useful to produce a list of formatting guidelines, not only for the code, but also for the included text.

Having everything consistent would definately help things out, and both a solid framework and good guidelines on how things should be done would be a good step towards that.

I also think the idea of having a sort of peer-review of the tutorials before they're published on the site in finalised form is a good idea, along with including some fairly quick and simple mechanism for users to indicate when something needs to be brought up to date again.

I seem to recall at some point seeing mention of the idea that NeHe tutorials should be put through the ERB process the rest of the site follows from now on - is that still planned, and would it be considered a good idea?

Quote: Original post by Kazgoroth
I seem to recall at some point seeing mention of the idea that NeHe tutorials should be put through the ERB process the rest of the site follows from now on - is that still planned, and would it be considered a good idea?

Well, not necessaraly the tutorials, but the articles.

Would it be possible to archice the original tutorials somewhere on the site? I think it would be nice to see the changes made from a how it was then, how it is now point of view.
Just a thought.

I also agree that we should update the tutorials on NeHe. I first started OpenGL by twiddling with NeHe's source code tutorials, but they didn't really get me very far. As soon as I picked up the Redbook recently to help me better understand OpenGL for my job, everything just made sense. I knew why I needed to set which matrix and when, I knew how to bind things appropriately, and I knew how the entire state machine worked. I could write code from my head instead of having to refer to code examples while using trial and error to figure out how to get things to work correctly.

I agree with the idea of making NeHe the source of all things OpenGL, and only OpenGL. However, OpenGL does take many forms and stretches across quite the enumeration of platforms. I think the best way to teach, and learn, OpenGL is to actually learn "OpenGL". Learning how OpenGL works makes learning things about OpenGL so much easier.

I think lessons/articles/documentation on NeHe should teach OpenGL, step by step. I also think, in addition, to the strict OpenGL documentation that documentation should also exist on the many different incarnations of OpenGL and the platform specifics, or non-specifics, of each. For example, creating a platform specific application using wgl is not quite the same as using xgl. A good discussion perhaps, would be why platform specific methods like this are a good/bad idea and how to avoid problems by using or not using them. Perhaps documentation on how to use platform specific calls and still maintain platform independence. Just the same as creating a platform independent application is different with glut and SDL.

This is my two cents on the subject.

Anon: Yep, the old tutorials are still good resources - and we can hardly update them all at once - so they'll still be useful for a long time to come.


Daishi: Well, remember that NeHe is about OpenGL game development, and it's also very beginner-friendly, so we'll still want to do some of the basic stuff to get a game going, including the platform-specific stuff.

Although we're not necessaraly going to leap into things like scripting and pathfinding.


In any case, the main focus (asside from the website) for now is to get the first couple of tutorials updated (lessons 1 to 6). Once those are working, then we can work out where to take things.