NeHe Lesson 06: Texture Mapping

So, it's been a while. I've been very busy with other stuff lately, but I haven't forgotten this blog.

The next lesson is about texture mapping. Go read it here. There's couple things I'd like to mention about SDL and OpenGL concerning this tutorial.

First of SDL has its own image loading functions, mainly SDL_LoadBMP, which loads BMP images. In a bigger project you might want to look at SDL_image for other image types.

The other thing is that you will need to flip and rotate your textures when using SDL. The following lines of code will setup OpenGL to do that for you.

glMatrixMode(GL_TEXTURE);
glRotatef(180.0f, 0.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f);
glScalef(-1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);

The full code listing can be found here.

Let's dance to the Tango 0.95 beta 1

So Tango's first beta has been released. So the first thing I did, was to go and ask when and if Derelict will support it. "In the very near future."

I will be using Tango exclusively from now on because as far as I'm concerned it's far better than Phobos. That might be my Java background talking too.

I'll start of by converting the existing lessons to Tango. That shouldn't take too long, as they don't have many dependencies to Phobos. But first I have to wait for Mr. Parker to add the support to Derelict.

A few words

I wanted to say a few words about the requirements for building the lessons from my blog. First of all I'm working on a Windows box and wont be doing very much testing on the other platforms. The code is mostly cross-platform so it should compile and run just fine on Linux or Mac OS X. I'll try to point out places where I've used platform specific code.

Next you will need the D compiler. There are two choices at the moment, the DMD from DigitalMars and GDC a GCC based compiler from here.

You also need the shared library for your platform from the SDL website.

I use Derelict for OpenGL and SDL bindings. You can grab them from there or do as I do and use DSSS, the D Shared Software System.

After that you should be ready to go.

Please note, that I'm not going to go over how you can compile a D program or the basic usage of the SDL library. For those problems there are already very good documentation on the net. Google is your friend.