New democoder

[evobyte]

Hello everyone!

I've been briefly lurking around this forum, so I thought it might be time to introduce myself and ask my first question, hehe.

So, I have some experience with OpenGL (read through and understood the Superbible).  Now, my question is, is there any sort of order I should go about learning the demo effects?  Do you have any book recommendations on math subjects (particularly geometry) that might be useful to me?  Even personal anecdotes about how you got started would be much appreciated.  Some things I have made so far are basic plasmas, a twisting tunnel that follows a sine-wave curve, and a typical cube type demo where there are about 100 cubes that rotate around and the whole set has a sort of wavy motion.  Now, I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, but now I'm looking to the future, and the better effects I might be able to make!

Thanks in advance for your input, and very good job on the site.  It's hard to find information as a beginner, so this is really a great idea.

- evobyte

[Jim]

Hi Evobyte!  Welcome to the forum!

I'm pretty sure you want to learn things in the order you need them   We don't run a course in demo fx

Probably the best way to learn is to try something, get a bit stuck, then ask some questions.  People here will definitely try to help you, especially if you share the results of your work.

I wish there had been forums available when I was learning - the ZX Spectrum era.  I used to go to the library and borrow books on programming.  I have no idea if there are any good general starter books out there any more.

Jim

[evobyte]

Hey Jim,

Thanks for replying!  I guess you're right about sort of working out the individual effects as I go along.  Now I have sort of a different question.  I've learned a lot about the OpenGL FFP, but I know that it is extremely deprecated and maybe even worthless to know these days.  So, where might I be able to get a smooth introduction to GLSL?  I've been searching around a lot, but there are precious few resources available to the complete beginner in terms of shading languages.

Thanks,
evobyte

[evobyte]

Oh and another question, haha, sorry for stacking them like this.  I am already quite experienced in programming with C/C++, but would it be worthwhile for me to learn some Freebasic, because it seems like a lot of the effects you guys discuss here are implemented in FB.  Would that make a smoother learning curve for me?

Thanks again.

[Jim]

We have a tiny opengl framework here
http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php/topic,2558.0.html
It's quite terse as it was designed for a 1kb demo.
Here's the source for my entry for our last competition
http://www.dbfinteractive.com/forum/index.php/topic,4748.0.html
It uses a mixture of FFP and pixel shaders.  You might be able to salvage something from there too
There are almost certainly other posts I have forgotten about.

I think you should stick with C and C++.  FB was very useful for us when most people were using Blitz Basic and needed to use something new when that went out of fashion.  FB is pretty fast, and very similar to older VB implementations.  It also came with a nice library for pixel bashing demos - those with no hardware acceleration.  I've spent a fair bit of time here trying to help people move up to C and C++ using Microsoft's excellent Visual Studio Express and there are lots of posts about setting that up.

Jim

[Shockwave]

Hi Evobyte, welcome to the forum

If it's any help to you, feel free to take anything you want from any of my listings too.

[evobyte]

Thanks for the advice Jim, and I downloaded the code for your entry as well, I'm going to see what I can learn from it. :-)  I will definitely be sticking with C++ too, thanks for clearing that up.

Hi to you too Shockwave, it's my pleasure being part of this forum.  I hope I can help sometimes too and not just ask questions ;-)

[benny!]

Welcome on board, evobyte.

Cool to see another face around here. I totally agree with Jim. Stick with C/C++.
It's a great IDE. Keep us informed about the progress you are making.

Best,
benny!