09/25/02: Dipping in a Toe

Kind of an odd title, but true.  Believe it or not, I actually did what I said I'd do and read through the first OpenGL tutorial on the NeHe site.  It was dipping a tentative toe in the vast ocean of OpenGL knowledge.

Anyway, the guy who wrote the tutorial was apparently programming with Microsoft Visual C++, so when I tried to run the code on the Computer Systems Lab computer, it blew me a raspberry.  I'll have to try running it at home on VC++.  Of course, there was a version of the code that was for Linux machines, but it didn't seem to have nearly as much error checking as the original code had.  Speaking of error checking, it really surprised me how much error checking was present in this first lesson.  The purpose of the code was to just create a window...nothing else, and the error checking was about 90% of the program.  I still don't completely understand what half those things were checking.  However, as I said, the Linux version of the code was much, much shorter.  I don't know if that's because there isn't as much need for error checking in Linux or the guy who converted it the code to work on Linux machines didn't know why the original coder added so much error checking either.  I did find something that may be potentially useful--I can get the keyboard routine to acknowledge two keys getting pressed at the same time.  Yay! =)