Posts Tagged ‘programming’

A New Way To Surf – LP

Sunday, October 12th, 2008

Gotta love it!

Everyone’s talking about IP TV and how it’s going to revolutionize things. We’ll be able to get our TV anywhere, any way, but the reality has fallen short of the promise. Your ISP may be beaming Digital channels down to you over IP, but the experience is largely unique to your ISP. Your cable box is not a TV Content browser, no matter how much it tries to be. Heck, you can’t even take your Time Warner Cable box and easily connect it to a Comcast user’s home. The spirit of the IP in IPTV is sorely missing.

That’s why I’m working on a better way–and I need your help.

There are several standards regarding IPTV (and they are used), but while they focus on delivering the content, they do not focus on the programming. If you’re looking at the web to solve your problem, don’t look there either. Every single news or content producer has their own site with their own way of accessing it. You need accounts, you need a pretty hefty browser, and you need to wade through a different interface each and every time.

There is no way to channel surf on the web.

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Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part IV

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

OpenGL

OpenGL is the Open Graphics Library and it is maintained by the Kronos Group, which is a consortium of top-tier companies that include board members such as ATI nVidia, Apple, IBM, and more. Microsoft used to be on the consortium, but left and decided to make DirectX, a competing closed graphics library that only runs on Windows (at least without some sort of emulation layer or wrapper like Wine or Cedega).

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Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part III

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Sorry for the delay in this post, but here’s Part III.

For reference, you probably want to start out with Part’s II and I here and here.

Last we left off I said I’d get into some of the basic mechanics of GLUT and OpenGL, so let’s hit the ground running.

GLUT

GLUT, or the Graphics Library Utility Toolkit, is a cross-platform C library for generating windows and handling IO events. Basically, GLUT was written so you can get to learning OpenGL very quickly without having to spend enormous amounts of time learning how to handle mouse or keyboard actions in your current OS, or worse, learn how to setup a simple GUI just so you can see your work. On top of making these tasks simpler, GLUT is, as I mentioned, cross-platform. This means that you can take your code and recompile it on another OS as long as you have the appropriate GLUT library referenced in your IDE. There are currently versions of GLUT created for Linux, OS X, Windows, and probably even more operating systems.

So how do we create a simple window?

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Programming Pong in C and OpenGL – Part II

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

This is the second part in what should be a four part series on how to program your very own Pong clone. The first article went over setting up your environment in your favorite OS, now this part gets into some of the mechanics or details on how to actually get started.

Before I start with anything, we have to think about simple animation. In fact, animation is just simply a series of static images, with each image slightly displaced from the last.

So what does that mean? (more…)

Technology of a 3D Engine

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Lions and Tigers and Octrees!  Oh My!

There’s a great article on Beyond3D about the technology of a 3D engine. The article’s split up into parts and part two was just released (after a several month wait!). Part one discusses a lot of the general concepts for a 3D engine design in an easy to read and abstract level, but part two goes into deeper detail. Both make for interesting reads, though part two sort of jumps into an ocean at no discernible point. (It covers scenegraphs I know, but why start there? Why not animation? Look for my own part two of programming a pong clone to animation and early concepts in game programming.)