GLEW is up to date with the latest OpenGL 3.x and possibly 4.0 extensions. OpenGL and GLEW Header Files and LibrariesĪs you can see from the above code, we are once again using GLEW. I won’t explain it, as it is pretty straight forward we are including some header files and linking some libraries, the only tricky part may be “#pragma once”, which isn’t standard but is widely supported, and means to only include the file once during compilation. So open it up and paste the following code. Main.h is going to contain all of our header files for the time being. I am going to go through these files one by one, starting with the header files, so that we don’t get mixed up shuffling between them. I am calling them: “main.cpp, main.h, opengl_3.cpp, opengl_3.h”. Make sure it is empty to begin with, and then create 4 files.
Opengl 3.3 tutorial windows#
So open up Visual Studio and create a new Windows Console Application in C++. This tutorial is going to be very similar in some ways to most Win32 OpenGL tutorials available, the only difference being that it has an OpenGL 3.2 context instead of a standard context. I’m also going to be aiming for a more Object Oriented approach to programming in these newer tutorials.
Let’s finally get into this tutorial, because it is going to be a long one.
Opengl 3.3 tutorial pdf#
*note* You can jump straight to the bottom of this page to grab the PDF version of this tutorial, or the project files. I will talk about this in a later tutorial, but there is a library called GLM, designed for use with OpenGL and GLSL, which will help us with our matrix operations. OpenGL now likes us to handle our own matrices. This means calls such as glRotate and glTranslate are now deprecated and not recommended. To put it simply, OpenGL does no matrix operations for us such as setting the Projection Matrix, setting the Model Matrix and setting the View Matrix. Matrices are one of the major things affected by OpenGL 3. Vertex Buffer Objects were available in OpenGL 1.5 and up as an extension, but they are now a part of the core of OpenGL. When it comes to rendering shapes, instead of setting the state and then calling the vertices one by one, OpenGL 3 and upwards wants us to use Vertex Buffer Objects and Vertex Buffer Arrays straight out. Without the Immediate Mode, OpenGL has gone for an almost entirely shader driven architecture, which gives us control over everything from the word go, and also greatly improves performance. OpenGL 3+ Key DifferencesĪn OpenGL 3+ and 4 context requires you to create a standard OpenGL context (version 1.x or 2.x) and then get your application to opt-in to using an OpenGL 4 context. These tutorials are going to be for Windows only, but if you are keen to get them working on a different OS (My Macbook doesn’t support OpenGL 3.x), please send me the ports and I will post them up.
In this tutorial, I am going to be simply creating a window with an OpenGL 3.2 context attached, nothing more, nothing less. If you would like to see some OpenGL 4 extensions in use, you can always donate and help me get a new graphics card. Now I know I have called this part of the site “OpenGL 4 Tutorials”, and all of a sudden I am talking about OpenGL 3, this is because OpenGL 3 and OpenGL 4 are extremely similar, with OpenGL 4 bringing in some new extensions, and because my graphics card only supports OpenGL 3.x. OpenGL 3 introduced a new way of programming in OpenGL that slightly raises the learning curve, but also does away with the entire Immediate Mode by deprecating a lot of the functions. OpenGL has undergone some major changes recently from version 3 and onwards.