The OpenGL Extensions Guide (Charles River Media Graphics) [Hardcover]

Eric Lengyel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1584502940 | ISBN-13: 978-1584502944 | Publication Date: July 16, 2003 | Edition: 1

OpenGL is the premier environment for developing 2D and 3D graphics and game applications. The interface has been the choice of game programmers, mainly because of its cross-platform operability, but also because it is constantly evolving to keep pace with hardware advances in the form of extensions. Until now, the game industry was lacking one single, concise reference to help make sense of the dozens of extensions available. The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides this much needed resource and concentrates specifically on the extensions most important to developing modern 3D games. The book is laid out in an intuitive fashion, discussing groups of extensions that modify or augment similar components of the base OpenGL architecture. In addition, the text focuses mainly on operational and implementation issues, discussing the underlying mathematics of an extension only when it is critical to understanding that extension's functionality.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Eric Lengyel is a veteran of the computer games industry with over 16 years of experience writing game engines. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Davis and an MS in Mathematics from Virginia Tech. Eric is the founder of Terathon Software, where he currently leads ongoing development of the C4 Engine.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 670 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1 edition (July 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584502940
• ISBN-13: 978-1584502944
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.7 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,143,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia > OpenGL

More About the Author

Eric Lengyel is a veteran of the computer games industry with over 16 years of experience writing game engines. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Davis and an MS in Mathematics from Virginia Tech. Eric is the founder of Terathon Software, where he currently leads ongoing development of the C4 Engine.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good reference, but slightly disappointing, September 29, 2003

By 

Dave Astle (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The OpenGL Extensions Guide (Charles River Media Graphics) (Hardcover)

I've often been frustrated by the fact that it's often hard to find good documentation for OpenGL extensions. The information in the extension registry, as well as in the latest OpenGL spec (for extensions that have been promoted to the core) is generally intended for OpenGL implementers, not OpenGL developers, so there usually isn't much about how or why you would use the extension. Sometimes, you can find papers and demos from one of the hardware vendors, such as Nvidia or ATI, but more often than not, you're left figuring it out on your own.

So when I heard about this book, I was really looking forward to it. Given the high quality of the author's other works, I expected it to immediately take a place on my desk.

This book is essentially an expansion of the information contained in the extension registry. It's considerably more user-friendly, the explanations are more detailed, and it conveniently groups the extensions by their functional area. However, it really doesn't discuss how or why you would use each extension in a game or graphics application. Nor does it include any demos, or even sample code. These factors keep the book from being as useful as it could have been.

Overall, this is a good book, and it provides a great reference for the extensions it covers, but it could have gone farther with showing you how to use them.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful reference, but incomplete and becoming outdated, February 1, 2005

By 

David Elder "elddm" (Boston, Ma United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The OpenGL Extensions Guide (Charles River Media Graphics) (Hardcover)

The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides a comprehensive reference for the main OpenGL extensions in use circa 2003. The extensions covered enable OpenGL support for features like new blending modes, texture environments, a variety of texture formats, fragment shading, pixel formats, point parameters, and assembly language vertex and fragment programs. The book devotes a chapter to each extension covered, and discusses the new functions, enums, constants, and general functionality provided by each extension. For several extensions, usage scenarios and example code are provides. By far the most useful chapters are the ones covering vertex and fragment programs, as the book provides a complete reference for the assembly languages and the OpenGL mechanisms for loading programs, setting attributes and parameters, etc. The program dialects covered are ARB vertex and fragment programs, as well as some proprietary NVIDIA versions.

For all its strengths, this book does have some flaws. First, the book is useful only if you already know, in general terms, what a particular extension does and you have a specific need for that functionality in your program. The book does not really give a general overview of the extensions, nor does it provide typical usage scenarios and sample code in all cases. In other words, the book is strictly a reference, since it provides very little introductory or tutorial material.

Second, the book is already getting out-of-date. There are a number of extensions that, in early 2005, are becoming widely used. These include:

Multiple Render Targets: The GL_ARB_draw_buffers and GL_ATI_draw_buffers extensions provide the ability to write color output to multiple buffers in a single rendering pass from a fragment program.

Non-power-of-two textures: The GL_ARB_non_power_of_two extension relaxes the requirement that OpenGL textures have power-of-two dimensions. It also provides more reasonable behavior in terms of texture coordinates and coordinate wrap modes than the GL_NV_texture_rectangle extension, which is discussed. Also, GL_NV_texture_rectangle has been supplanted by GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which is not discussed.

OpenGL shading language: This is the wave of the future. OpenGL 2.0 provides a high-level programming language for writing vertex and fragment programs, and its functionality is exposed through several extensions. Of course, this wasn't available in 2003.

Vertex and pixel buffer objects: The GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object and GL_ARB_pixel_buffer_object extensions allow the programmer to create vertex and pixel buffers in high-performance video memory (managed by the driver) and do things like copy a pixel buffer into a vertex buffer. This allows you to do things like render new vertex positions into a pixel buffer, and then use the pixel values as the vertex input in a subsequent rendering pass.

The verdict: The OpenGL Extensions Guide provides comprehensive material about a wide range of extensions in use in 2003. It has virtually no tutorial material and several of the extension covered in this book are becoming obsolete. Also, several important new extensions are not covered. Hopefully a new edition will cover more relevant material, although this is obviously a moving target.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent reference!, September 28, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The OpenGL Extensions Guide (Charles River Media Graphics) (Hardcover)

Finally! this book is a long overdue alternative to reading the raw extension specs on opengl.org. It covers all of the extensions I've ever needed, and a few more that I didn't even know existed. The only thing I can complain about is that is doesn't have anything on pbuffers, but don't get me wrong, this book is nice and meaty and is a great resource for opengl programmers. Definitely recommended!