Requests for Tutorials

[gojira]

Hi all!

These are great forums and I’m really learning a lot here. Thanks to everyone who has contributed from a newbie!

There are still some questions that I have that also might make good tutorials/How-To’s. I thought I’d post them up in a new thread. If others like the idea of a request list for tutorials, post up your own ideas below.

So without further ado, I bring you my own little request list:

1. Rasters, Databuffers and Images Tutorial. I understand the basic concepts of these (I think) but there is just a bewildering number of combinations here. Add in SampleModels and ColorModels, and the number just explodes. I’d like to see a Tutorial or How-To that covers a large number of practical formats. What color model and sample model does a GIF use? What about BMPs and TIFF files? TGA? PNG? JPEG? And what are the most common color and sample models for screens, esp those used by JOGL? How do I test for them, and how to I convert (efficeintly) between them?

2. Publishing You Application. This is more of a general Java question, but how would I release a Java app or applet that uses JOGL? There’s a couple of libraries that need to be available (JOGL.jar and the *-natives.jar), how do I load/access these at runtime?

Ok, there’s a couple of ideas. If anyone can help, muchas gras! I’d love to get my hands on well-written tutorials for these subjects. I’ve looked and most basic introductions fall far short. Linkies to existing tutorials are great! Or originally written ones too. Otherwise, I’ll probably be posting some specific questions as issues come up.

[kbr]

@gojira

1. Rasters, Databuffers and Images Tutorial. I understand the basic concepts of these (I think) but there is just a bewildering number of combinations here. Add in SampleModels and ColorModels, and the number just explodes. I’d like to see a Tutorial or How-To that covers a large number of practical formats. What color model and sample model does a GIF use? What about BMPs and TIFF files? TGA? PNG? JPEG? And what are the most common color and sample models for screens, esp those used by JOGL? How do I test for them, and how to I convert (efficeintly) between them?

If you’re focusing on doing texturing using OpenGL, you don’t really need to worry about the complexity of the AWT image models. Depending on your type of application, if you just care about getting the texture on to the graphics card and rendering textured polygons afterward, it doesn’t matter what kind of image format you choose. From an implementation standpoint TGA images are closest to what OpenGL can consume, DDS images provide texture compression support, JPG provides the smallest on-disk representation and PNG supplies lossless compression. The TextureIO classes in com.sun.opengl.util can read all of these formats. See the demos.texture.TestTexture demo in the jogl-demos workspace.

@gojira

2. Publishing You Application. This is more of a general Java question, but how would I release a Java app or applet that uses JOGL? There’s a couple of libraries that need to be available (JOGL.jar and the *-natives.jar), how do I load/access these at runtime?

Go to the jogl-demos web page and right-click -> Save As any of the .jnlp launch links. You should find it’s remarkably easy to deploy applications which use JOGL with Java Web Start – all you need to do is add one extension JNLP line to your own JNLP file and all of the downloading and installation of the JOGL jar file and native code is done for you.