What we really need is for someone to create examples of everything beginners-advance use that in compliance with every version. This will strongly aid people. People can go to the samples, and probably copy the code (if you are true beginner), but have some reference to learn from.
Just because you have the code, doesn’t mean it explains no matter how good the commentation. There should be videos following along discussing why the code is there and what the code does.
Sure, that would be great. But who’s gonna invest his entire lifetime to do such a thing?
You have no idea how absolutely and horribly much effort that is to develop a coherent and complete set of examples/tutorials/demos…
There are good examples out there. I myself learnt mostly from “Neon Helium” (aka. NeHe).
And I can only imagine how many years (or even decades) it must have cost him (or her?) to do those fantastic demos.
The problem is: Once you are finished writing those demos, sufficient time has passed by to start all over again, because two or three major OpenGL versions have arrived by then.
Even learning all the things you need to know in order to properly do such a demo requires you significant amounts of time.
Doing something like this in a well coherent and complete from is just not feasible.
You will simply have to not bitch about there not being good enough resources all the time, and instead bite the bullet and research various articles, demos, tutorials and books to learn from.
[quote]And I can only imagine how many years (or even decades) it must have cost him (or her?) to do those fantastic demos.
[/quote]
I fully don’t agree that you think NeHe has excellent tutorials.
[quote]You have no idea how absolutely and horribly much effort that is to develop a coherent and complete set of examples/tutorials/demos…
[/quote]
I don’t agree with you thinking it would take a lot of effort. It does take time though.
It won’t take several years to write tutorials and you will just update as you go. Most of the tutorials will not be affected unless some huge change takes place that affects everything in the latest opengl version. For minor versions, minor changes.
So to reiterate: initial bulk tutorials, patching minor changes/future tutorials
Then why don’t you do it? Go ahead and write complete and consistent tutorials and examples explaining everything in a way that is actually better than NeHe.
And if you say to yourself “nah, I am not doing that.” ask yourself why other people would think otherwise.
[quote]I don’t agree with you thinking it would take a lot of effort. It does take time though.
[/quote]
Man… seriously. Are you kidding me? Time IS effort. And on top of that it will be hard, very hard, because you have to know what you write about and have to be able to present it in a consistent and understandable way. So you have to have didactic skills and writing skills.
This is incredibly hard work, I assure you.
Or you could enroll in a higher-education course specializing in computer graphics.
Those teachers, man, it’s like they are being paid to help people learn! :o
[quote]And if you say to yourself “nah, I am not doing that.” ask yourself why other people would think otherwise.
[/quote]
I don’t have enough knowledge yet.
Why don’t you create some with the knowledge you do have?
If you don’t want to put in the effort for learning you don’t deserve the results.
There are plenty of high-quality OpenGL tutorials and samples out there for anyone who looks. If you can’t be bothered, then just find a library that abstracts it away.
For people who do want to learn OpenGL with LWJGL 3, there is a new GitBook currently in the making.
It looks promising for newcomers: https://www.gitbook.com/book/lwjglgamedev/3d-game-development-with-lwjgl/details
I ported the OpenGL Sample Pack to jogl here. Apart the init, you can easily replace all the calls in lwjgl.
There is also a short wiki for each opengl profile, I copy pasted most of the relevant parts, I suggest you to read it religiously 8)
And don’t ignore kai’s advices, if you want to learn, you really need to invest effort in learning, unfortunately there aren’t any other effective ways.
[quote]I don’t have enough knowledge yet.
[/quote]
That really need not be the case and you may underestimate your own knowledge.
You should begin writing something and learn as you move along. There are some people who do it like this. They learn and then write that down for others to read. And they enjoy the compliments and the encouragement by their readers to continue. This is what motivates them.
And it’s a great motivation.
It is just likely your fear of being ridiculed and embarrassed when you present your work to the public. But this fear is unjustified and something like this really will not happen here on JGO.
People here are nice and want for everyone to learn and evolve and eventually write great games.
And people respect and value the effort being put into something.
The people who disregard, disrespect and take down others’ work and effort do it because they suffer from fear that this will happen (or has happened in the past) to them, too, and they did not take the courage to overcome that fear. So it is rather a stance of defense.
But you don’t need that on JGO. It’s a great community here and you can really present what you know and do and share it with others.
[quote]That really need not be the case and you may underestimate your own knowledge.
[/quote]
Thanks for the ego boost? 
[quote]You should begin writing something and learn as you move along.
[/quote]
I don’t have enough background knowledge to know what I am talking about fully even though I’ve been opengl almost 2 years with 2 large breaks. I wouldn’t deny it if I didn’t have confidence. I could only make 2.9.3 tutorials and I didn’t master immediary mode (who needs to?) and display lists for the other versions. Right now I tried to make my own Mat4 object using my own Vec3 and my Mat4 doesn’t work properly - I followed code from LWJGL jar, but it just won’t work 
[quote]This is what motivates them. And it’s a great motivation.
[/quote]
Even with proper motivation, I can’t dedicate anything right now. I do have a lot on my hands from preparing for college and finishing highschool. It doesn’t help that I am on a forum in class with my school laptop, but hey I’ve done worse things …
[quote]It is just likely your fear of being ridiculed and embarrassed when you present your work to the public.
[/quote]
Wat?
As a technical writer I have spent decades writing tutorials and developer guides; it’s not a trivial task (at least for me) and much harder than writing the code and samples for the tutorials.
In my support function it is simple to give a client a piece of code done the right way, but explaining to the client why it is right so they can do it for themselves in the future is the tricky part!
I find it easy to make sense of things that I understand fully. I usually explain things to people flawlessly. However, if I don’t know the subject fully enough, which in this case it’s dangerous because so many opengl versions all being combined together, it can lead to misrepresentation or misunderstanding for the future people. This is why wikis are so popular and good - many people can contribute their knowledge and error fix people.
Maybe I should start a wiki for opengl? I don’t know of any… http://lmgtfy.com/?q=opengl+wiki
Literally the first entry…
http://puu.sh/nwoM3/7260c7563c.png
When you tried to explain your “new programming language” (if one has devised new syntax, surely they would understand it to the fullest extent?) to HeroesGraveDev, everyone in IRC got very confused.
Hardly flawless.
It’s one of my goals. I have structured a preference for myself. That’s also my future goal.
OpenGL wiki is full of excellent information. Although, I am looking for something higher level. I’m surprised nobody in tutorials on youtube or articles ever refer to the wiki. It is a lot of information and you need a entry point somewhere. So, at this time, the goal for writing tutorials is to understand the information on the wiki by implementation.
I’m going to throw in my 2c and say that writing OpenGL tutorials is soon going to be redundant.
On one side of the fence, you have people who don’t care, and will just use an engine that hides it all away.
And on the other side, you have people that love all the low level fiddling, and therefore will ditch OpenGL for Vulkan.
There might be a very narrow area in the middle, but I suspect those people will be perfectly happy to use the resources that already exist.
OpenGL is too big to die out immediately and in the next 10 years it will still be around. Vulkan, to my understanding, works with OpenGL, but I have 0 research and 0 understanding of Vulkan.
Vulkan and OpenGL are independent of each other, although with the latest OpenGL plus the right extensions you can get almost identical behaviour in the common cases. (And having 0 knowledge of Vulkan now only puts you behind everyone else by a few weeks)
Probably, but people won’t be bothered writing new tutorials by that time.
Therefore, you should just use the resources that are already available. They are plenty good enough to learn from. Lots of other people can manage and I don’t see why you can’t.
Even if you plan on jumping to Vulkan later, you probably still need to learn OpenGL first or you’ll completely be lost.
From what I learned from the community, I can determine that people will still use it for years to come and the future technologies is not all that important until near deprecation. People still use fixed function pipeline because they want immediate results and ease. This stems from my Unity thread and my Why people still use fixed function pipeline thread (or so I named it).