Lecture rambling

I'm currently finishing up my preparations for an introductory lecture on rendering engine design, which is a follow-up to one I had a while back on OpenGL. Surprisingly, it's actually been trickier to prepare for this one, despite the fact that I supposedly know more about this subject. However, while the previous one was about a well-defined API and its mathematical underpinnings, this one is about best practices, common design patterns and other even more intangible knowledge gathered from experience. Success and failure aren't objectively measurable in the same ways here.

This has made it rather tricky to prepare the slides for the lecture, something I otherwise find both fun and easy. There's just no clear, linear path available to take me through a substantial amount of the area to be covered. In fact, the material is so self-referential that I'm finding myself wishing for goto in Impress.

What I will try to do is steer it towards more of a discussion between me and the audience, rather than just having me stand there presenting my preferences. I'm hoping that a few other sceners will be attending, which should help to make the discussion more nuanced (but hopefully not too advanced for the people who came for the promised introduction).

Oh well, I'm off to the campus to finish my slides.

I hate blogging memes

...but this one was apparently irresistible:

B6 d- t- k s u-- f- i o++ x e- l- c-

GLFW braindump #3

There, the first (and hopefully last) beta of version 2.6 is out and the amount of work remaining before the actual release is approaching manageable proportions. It's basically a few bug fixes, about 100 SLOC of Win32 FSAA code and a few paragraphs of text in the User's Guide.

Yay, I think.

I also note that the Win32 binary package is almost as popular a download as the *nix flavoured source packages, which says something about the user base. I hope I did a good job of building it, because a lot of the support requests lately have come from Win32 users unable to build the library (as might be expected from a platform with no standardised structures for development environments).

We've also have a web designer join the project. While he's busy right now, he'll be designing a new site for us when time and inspiration coincides. I have little idea when that might be, but I have every confidence that the result will be excellent. Having a less painful design to work against will be excellent, especially as I've been meaning to add a patch submitter's guide for a while now.

The discussions on the feature set and API for 3.0 have begun (tentatively) and as usual the timing is perfectly horrible. I need to spend the coming weeks working on the Birdie demo and the week after that finishing the material for my rendering engine design lecture. Then I'll be mostly free to work on GLFW, but that's far too long from now.

Update: Updated.

OpenGL on Vista; problem solved

Just a quick note; many people wrote about Microsoft's plans of crippling OpenGL on Windows Vista, but very few have written about the fact that the issue was officially resolved last year (with an announcement to that effect at a BOF at SIGGRAPH).

Thus, the ARB (or what used to be the ARB) has therefore published a statement clarifying the current situation (i.e. OpenGL on Vista works the way it's supposed to), and I thought I'd help by pointing at it.

Reality wins again

'38 214 62 45 178 91 204 116 247 110 121 234 76 121 167 239'.split.each { |s| printf '%02x ', s.to_i ^ 47 }

I'd like to thank the MPAA for playing. Good luck next time. We'll be waiting for you.

Update: Made it shorter.