Some time ago I stumbled upon a great e-book on OpenGL programming: Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming. The best thing about it is that it teaches the modern approach to graphics programming, based on OpenGL 3.3 with programmable shaders, and not the "fixed pipeline" known from OpenGL 1.x which is now considered obsolete. I already know a lot about vectors, matrices and all the basics, and I have some general idea about how shaders work, but this book describes everything in a very organized fashion and it allows me to broaden my knowledge.
When I first learned OpenGL over 10 years ago, it was all about a bunch of glBegin/glVertex/glEnd calls and that's how Grape3D, my first 3D graphics program, actually worked. Fraqtive, which also has a 3D mode, used the incredibly advanced technique of glVertexPointer and glDrawElements, which dates back to OpenGL 1.1.
A lot has changed since then. OpenGL 2.0 introduced shaders, but they were still closely tied to the fixed pipeline state objects, such as materials and lights. The idea was that shaders could be used when supported to improve graphical effects, for example by using per-pixel Phong lighting instead of Gouraud lighting provided by the fixed pipeline. Since many graphics cards didn't support shaders at that time, OpenGL would gracefully fall back to the fixed pipeline functionality, and everything would still be rendered correctly.
Nowadays all decent graphics cards support shaders, so in OpenGL 3.x the entire fixed pipeline became obsolete and using shaders is the only "right" way to go. There is even a special mode called the "Core profile" which enforces this by disabling all the old style API. This means that without a proper graphics chipset the program will simply no longer work. I don't consider this a big issue. All modern games require a chipset compatible with DirectX 10, so why should a program dedicated to rendering 3D graphics be any different? Functionally OpenGL 3.3 is more or less the equivalent of DirectX 10, so it seems like a reasonable choice.
I was happy to learn that Qt supports the Core profile, only to discover that it's not actually working because of an unresolved bug. Besides, the article mentions that "some drivers may incur a small performance penalty when using the Core profile". This sounds like a major WTF to me, because the whole idea of the Core profile was to simplify and optimize things, right? Anyway I decided to use OpenGL 3.3 without enforcing the Core profile for now, but to try to implement everything as if I was using that profile.
Another problem that I faced is that my laptop is three years old, and even though its graphics chipset is pretty good for that time (NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M), I discovered that the OpenGL version was only 2.1. I couldn't find any newer drivers from Lenovo, so I installed the latest generic drivers from NVIDIA and now I have OpenGL 3.3. Yay! So I modified my Descend prototype to use shaders 3.30 and QGLBuffer objects (which are wrappers for Vertex Buffer Objects and Index Buffer Objects), but I will write more about it in the next post.