OpenGL/MiniGL Templates

This section is not intended to be a tutorial on OpenGL; there are enough tutorials available elsewhere and links to some of these resources are given below. Likewise, others are in the process of writing tutorials and documentation for MiniGL, so I will not duplicate their effort; once again, links will be provided when they are available. Instead, this section provides a set of templates for getting started with OpenGL using MiniGL.

Requirements

To use the templates, you will require the following:

• Amiga OS 4.0 or higher,
• The Amiga OS 4 SDK, and
• MiniGL 2.0 (the include files need to be installed into your SDK).

or:

• An operating system with OpenGL 1.3 or better (some templates may require higher versions)
• A C compiler with the OpenGL header files

Some of the templates are fully platform independent so the same code should be compilable on any system with GCC, an OpenGL implementation, and GLUT.

OpenGL Utility Toolkit

The OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT), is a toolkit that offers a platform independent API for opening and handling windows for 3D graphics using OpenGL. It also provides a simple method of handling keyboard and mouse events. Whilst dated, GLUT is an excellent way to get started with OpenGL programming. There are newer toolkits that could also be used, but a (incomplete) GLUT implementation is provided as part of MiniGL.

The Templates

• A Basic GLUT Application
• Frame-Rate Independent Animation
• Full-Screen GLUT 
• More to follow...

Links

• The Amiga OS 4 SDK 
• OpenGL website
• The OpenGL specifications (including GLUT)
• Neon Helium Productions - Contains OpenGL tutorials
• Lighthouse 3D GLUT tutorial