I started programming OpenGL in 1998 as a project for fun. I was really interested in computer and math and graphics programming seemed to be the best way tease both those interests. At the time I don’t think DirectX was an option and besides the majority of my coding was being done on UNIX platforms so OpenGL was the best option. Graphics programming on the face of it is somewhat intimidating, and especially in a windowed environment it becomes even more problematic. To remedy this common problem a developer created a framework called GLUT. This framework concerns itself with the details of windowing, and windowing across platforms for that matter so all you as the developer have to concern yourself with is the complexities of your OpenGL application. The other great thing is you can write your code and with no modifications just a simple recompile it will run on each platform that has existing implementation of GLUT. An explanation of GLUT is beyond the scope of what I have to say in this series of articles, but suffice it to say, it works, it makes you life easy and there is more than adequate documentation on the internet if you need to looking anything up.

Programming OpenGL is relatively simple. In this series I’m going to start by showing how to work in 2D space by drawing a simple line, then moving to a grid, then a 2D maze and then evolving that to a 3D maze.

[tags]OpenGL, C, OS X[/tags]