the 3.2 core spec is gold. if you are new to gl the spec might seem a tad terse at first but you'll get used to it. also there's the quick ref cards, all of which are available from the registry.

i hear fraps mentioned a lot.

not really. there are functions to retrieve texture dimensions though.

every x minutes you could press printscreen, or alt+printscreen to capture the active window. :)

if you want to get REALLY fancy with it i think glReadPixels is your screen grab buddy.

not sure but i think the preferred way to do this in a game is to trace a ray from the player to the desired camera location, say within a bounding sphere radius of intersection with the world. then...

please see the glsl spec on texture functions. implicit lods are unsupported in the vertex shader. you need to use one of the *lod flavors or such to sample at the vertex level.

please don't cross post.

i don't think this is gl related but you could look at an existing ui to see how they handle it (no pun intended).

sure would be nice if gl and d3d could see eye to eye on this one...............

you may find it informative to plot some values on a graph and also to visualize the viewing frustum by back...

with texturing you have control over the whole shebang so it doesn't eally make sense to use a "d3d matrix", use whatever makes sense for your application.

vertex pipeline is different since gl...

have you considered using an image library like DevIL?

i think it comes with some samples on how to upload image data to the GL.

otherwise you could look at the sample code in the redbook, it's...

if this is for video update you may want to search the advanced forum.

"Does it mean people who use OpenGL for things like custom user interface will have to write vertex shaders? LOL."

fortunately for those up to their armpits in legacy code there will be fallbacks...

ah, that explains it :)

i dunno about being any faster, 100 quads isn't much these days. I'm rendering my sky/atmosphere with a skydome that has thousands of triangles in it. It really depends on what you're doing and what...

Nice job, Herc. That reminds me a lot of the sky in Unreal.

Another possibility is to use an alpha texture with a radial falloff instead of the subdivision. That'll give you per pixel blendable...

The spec does seem to be a bit thin with respect to hardware support for specific functions. But I have no vertex shader problems with fract on a NV40 (GLSL validate says all is well). You sure it's...

Perhaps this will help you catch your mistake?

If you put your billboard radius in your position selector vector element, that leaves the billboard origin.w for the rotation angle, with the camera basis still in the constants. I might do the...

i can't resist adding TCB splines to the mix. I've been playing with these lately and they're pretty darn sweet. They're basically Catmull-Rom splines, but with added control.

For interpolation...

For a particle system, I'd be inclined to store the camera basis in constants, then just deal with the billboard origin and a vector scale per vertex. Like a 4-vector that's zero every where but for...

If there is, it's not public, or they're hiding it from me in particular.

Nvidia's got a bunch of cool toys in works. This, the conditional render thing, geometry shaders, ... I'm getting a bit...

I'm not quite sure what you're up to here. Do you intend to keep the tangent basis orthonormal, or do you want to shear it slightly?

In either case it seems like it should work alright, as long as...

I don't know about you, but I'd love to do some good AI for a change ;)

I couldn't agree more ;)