Announcement: Quick update

BBB · 2007-01-26T09:55:01

Just wanted to give a quick update on how things are going. First of all be assured that Nehe is still in development, progress has just been a little slow lately as we do this on our free time and have school and/or work besides Nehe. [smile] I would also like to give some info on the current plan. As you all know we have decided to re-write the tutorials and, most importantly, their code. For this we decided to make two codebases. One simple basecode used in the first 15 (or so) lessons and an advanced SDK for all lessons after that. The introcode has been kept as simple as possible to help inexperienced users learn OpenGL while the SDK has much more bells and whistles (a big kudos to our team-member Gregs for all his work on the SDK). One key aspect in both the introcode and the SDK that I want to highlight is that we have separated all the generic OGL code from the OS-specific, window-system related code. Here is how we have coded the introcode (note that if you are a beginner you will probably don't understand the following. But don't worry, everything will be explained in the actual lessons): First we have the class for each lesson, for example class CNeheLesson02. This class houses the generic OpenGL code and is completely operating-system-independent. We then have a class for each window-system (GLX, WGL, SDL et.c.) that takes care of window-creation and all the OS-specific aspects. These classes all inherit from CNeheBaseWindow which acts as an interface. The only thing the lesson-class needs is a CNeheBaseWindow pointer. The lesson-class doesn't know or care about which window-system-class is hidden behind this pointer. You simply write a backend-class for SDL/GLX/WGL/GLUT/whatever, tell the CNeheLesson<X>-class to use it and thats all there is to it. Thanks to this design ALL of the lessons can right from the start be used on any operating system with any windowing-sytems. This also means that we have a shared codebase for the windowing-code. If someone discovers a bug in the GLX-code we simply update the CNeheGLXWindow-class. All you need to do is download the new CNeheGLXWindow-source, tell CNeheLesson<X> to use it instead and voila: you benefit from the new, improved code. [smile] In the old nehe-tutorials you would need to manually update _EVERY_ lesson by hand which needless to say wasn't very fun. One drawback though is that this increases the complexity a bit and you also get a few issues with the different keycodes of the various window-APIs, but we think that the advantages greatly outweigh the slight increase of complexity. Also, one of our goals with the new Nehe-lessons is to teach newcomers how to write proper code and this is a very good technique. If you are studying design-patterns then you know that this is called the "Adapter Pattern". This new design is by the way one of the reasons why we are so delayed. When I wrote the forum-announcement on beta testing I thought that we would be able to quickly implement this new design but that has clearly been not the case. However I think we can all agree that it should rather be done properly and released late rather then improperly and early. [smile] I and the rest of the team will continue working and in the meantime make sure you all have a good winter-holiday and a happy new year. [smile] Cheers // BBB and the NeHe-team

Announcement: Quick update

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Announcement: Quick update

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