Please excuse typos etc, I'm drunk...

Although not totally related to OpenGL, although 3D related, I'd LOVE to see an article/tutorial on rotations in 3D.

Rotations in 3D have always done my head in, in 2D it's easy, but 3D = hard.
I want to know how to rotate things in relation to global space and in object space using matrices and quaternions.
A tutorial covering Yaw/pitch/roll in object and global space, calculation of heading/pitch/yaw,/direction based on current matrix etc.

I find currently, that the NeHe tutorials gloss over rotations using glRotatef and do not go into enough detail.

I'm not dissing the NeHe tutorials, it's because of them that I am enjoying programming today, but I wish I'd had (and have) a definitive guide to rotations.

Thanks for your time, and I hope I made sense,
Dave.C.


EDIT:...

Also.. a bunch of tutorials somewhere on gamedev which teach you the required trigonometry, calculus and linear algebra required for game programming would be great!

[Edited by - TerraX on April 6, 2006 7:27:10 PM]

Ah - a good point.

Later I'll be making a thread to seek ideas and suggestions for the tutorials, but if you have any other ideas now, feel free to bring them up.

Something that came up in the beginners' forum is that some modern compilers default to unicode, and the old tutorials don't take this into account when using strings with system functions. Any rewrite will have to bear this in mind.

btw. I'm rewriting the NeHe SDK in my spare time (what there is of it) to use more modern coding conventions and to be cross platform (Win32/Linux/MacOSX). Any suggestions, send me a PM.

Quote: Original post by gregs
Something that came up in the beginners' forum is that some modern compilers default to unicode, and the old tutorials don't take this into account when using strings with system functions. Any rewrite will have to bear this in mind.

For the future, how about we require certian things of the tutorials, eg. must support unicode, must abstract platform specifics, etc.

Quote: Original post by gregs
btw. I'm rewriting the NeHe SDK in my spare time (what there is of it) to use more modern coding conventions and to be cross platform (Win32/Linux/MacOSX). Any suggestions, send me a PM.

Ill help in my free time if I get a chance.

Richard

I think I'll stick the design docs up when they're ready.

I think for lesson 1, you guys should add in information regarding this problem as well as to the Forum's FAQ. It comes up quite often that having it mentioned in the Lesson itself would be very benefitial.

I only read through about half the topic so far, but I'm still fairly new to OpenGL (I picked it up maybe a year ago, and have been inconsistant with teaching myself) so I can provide a limited newbie's perspective.

NeHe is great for "cut and paste" coding, which is quite useful if you could care less about the graphics other than to *have* graphics. When it comes time to modify the graphics, attempt to create something not explicitly in any of the tutorials, it becomes inordinately difficult.

For instance, I'm having problems with mouse picking in my current code because the copy and paste selection of picking code on NeHe doesn't work. I have no idea why it doesn't work, so I've put it aside for the moment.

So the core dumps can be useful as a kind of fast-food coding, but they should be complimented by thorough explanations of just what the heck is going on.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
Fix the tutorials.

Agreed. I realize that a lot of people think fondly of NeHe as How They Learned Graphics Programming, but the fact is, it's a recipe approach that doesn't help people internalize the concepts being presented, and may even discourage experimentation.

I disagree. Tutorials provide a method to explain the concept and to also demonstrate it. Granted concepts will be narrowed by following the tutorial path, but at least a narrow concept is explained. The alternative is dry theory which NOBODY wants to look at.

Quote: Original post by Simian Man
I think the tutorials should be updated to C++. NeHe did this himself with the later tutorials, but he did it rather inconsistently and did not update the previous lessons.

Reading C++ is just so much easier than C even for beginners. We don't want to encourage those C idioms like the elipsis construct or using char*.

I don't know what your problem is with elipsis, or char *. Both are very useful and functional. Also C++ includes both of them so your argument seems silly anyways.

C++ classes really help organize code and data so it can be better understood, the only thing to avoid is hiding the code in some baseclass that the guy trying to learn will never see because he's just using interfaces, instead of code.

Quote: Original post by iplayfast
I don't know what your problem is with elipsis, or char *. Both are very useful and functional. Also C++ includes both of them so your argument seems silly anyways.

C++ classes really help organize code and data so it can be better understood, the only thing to avoid is hiding the code in some baseclass that the guy trying to learn will never see because he's just using interfaces, instead of code.

Uh. You better go and look up std::string and std::ostringstream. They're effective replacements for char* and the ellipses construct respectively.

It sounds like you've been exposed to some fairly poor C++ coding practices, if you're suggesting their use. This is something we're trying to counter-act - by making NeHe (a great beginners resource) up to date with correct, modern C++ usage - so that new programmers pick up these things.

For the same reasons, we'll also make correct use of interfaces and inheritance and such. It's just as important to demonstrate good C++ as it is to demonstrate good OpenGL usage. But don't worry - will will go to great lengths to explain the underlying code.