Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming

one of the best resources to learn modern OpenGL and the one which helped me quite a lot is the Book at www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/ – or lets better say was. Unfortunately the domain expired so the content is no longer reachable.

Luckily the Book was designed as an open source project and the code to generate the website is still available at Bitbucket. Unfortunately this repository does not seem to be actively maintained any more.

Therefore I set out to make the Book to be available again using Github Pages. You can find the results here:

https://paroj.github.io/gltut/

However I did not simply mirror the pages, but also improved it at several places. So what has changed so far?

  • converted mathematical expressions from SVG to inline MathML. This does not only improve readability in browsers, but also fixes broken math symbols when generating the PDF.
  • replace XSLTHL by highlight.js for better syntax highlighting
  • added fork me on github badge to website to visualize that one can easily contribute
  • enabled the Optimization Appendix. While it is not complete, it already provides some useful tips and maybe encourages contributions.
  • updated the Documentation build to work on Linux
  • added instructions how to Build the website/ PDF Docs

hopefully these changes will generate some momentum so this great Book gets extended again. As there were also non-cosmetical changes like the new Chapter I also tagged a 0.3.9 release.

I the process of the above work I found out that there is also a mirror of the original Book at http://alfonse.bitbucket.org/oldtut/. This one is however at the state of the 0.3.8 release, meaning it does not only misses the above changes but also some adjustment happened post 0.3.8 at bitbucket.