Thanks for the advice and the links to papers, Ill make sure to check it out.
However, im kind of sceptical of you saying that you wont be geometry limited. If youre not, then just throw more...

if the ztest is disabled? i dont understand, wont this result in far away grass possibly overwriting the near grass in the frame buffer? and this is a BAD thing.

yeah, but the whole problem arises in the transparent parts. This is most noticeable as texture minification occurs, so you get an averaging of alpha 1.0 texels and alpha 0.0 texels, so at the edges...

Im designing an occlusion culling system for a game atm. One thing is that it needs to be pretty general, since I am aiming for seamless transitions from indoor areas to large outdoor ones.
I...

Ok, im trying to implement some effects for my engine such as a grass field and other thing like particle system. For these things I need alpha blending, but then you need to have a back to front...

Just a quick question, can you access the value of a texture from a vertex shader? If so, from what generation of video cards is this feature supported?

i dont understand why youre saying that you never have alot of data in VBOs in games... in my terrain engine, i have a single VBO with 1024x1024 verteces, and something like 32 bytes per vertex, that...

Hmmm, I may see about writing a vertex program actually, cant see why I didnt think of that...
And yeah, its not frame rate dependant since the velocity is dependant on frame rate too, so the...

No point sprites, they have disadvantages that Im not willing to accept.
I dont know how many particle, but why does that matter? I want it as fast as possible.
My origina thought basially is...

Hi, im currently working on a particle system for a game. Anyway, I would like to achieve an effect where the individual particle are streaked, that is, they are stretched in the direction of...

Hi, can you maybe post a screenshot? Because Im kinda thinking about using a detail bump map in combination with texture splatting, but Im not sure how the bump mapping would turn out, since I always...

There are alot of pretty popular games that use opengl. Games from Bioware such as baldurs gate series use some OpenGL, NWN, UT games have OpenGL rendering, Diablo2, Warcraft 3 and World of warcraft...

Ok, by photorealistic id day you couldnt tell the difference between a movie of a relatively complex real world scene (not just a box in an emtpy room) and a realtime rendering of the same scene. ...

Ive just read this article:
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=139&page=1

which talks about the near future of real time graphics. It goes on about realtime...

Man, we havent had a good ole "D3D vs OGL" thread in ages. This is almost nostalgic.

I have a dilema. When vsync is on, then the swap buffers function call stalls, correct? Does this mean that it is impossible to actually update the world faster than the refresh rate if vsync is on...

I have a terrain engine which uses VBO's, the code for the VBO's seems pretty solid, its abstracted away into a server kind of interface. Anyway, my terrain works flawlessly for anything less than...

LOD can be done well, it can be done horribly too. For LOD to be done well, the LOD should only change when the pixel error of the change is very small, sometimes even 1 pixel or less. My terrain...

Ummm, I have NO idea why your GLUT headers arent protected, they SHOULD be. Anyway, open up the GLUT header and put in if it isnt ther already

#ifndef __GLUT_H__
#define __GLUT_H__

// rest of...

What is the best way to render LOTS of grass? By lots I dont mean high detail, I mean say rendering a plain or a prarie?
The way I see it at the moment, is just a buttload of alpha tested tall-grass...

One thing you can try to do is that if every frame your rendering over every pixel (for example, if you hgave a skybox), then just clear the depth buffer and not the color buffer. This is because you...

Argh, the advanced forum is down, anyway.

Has anyone read or heard anything about the new book recently released called
"The OpenGL Shading Language"? Im thinking of buying it. So yeah, any...

Try DevIL, I find that it is extremely good. Can be used with DirectX as well.

Im not sure exactly what you need, but have you considered multitexturing?

gluPerspective(zoom, width/height, 0.1f, 1000.0f);

lower the value of zoom (a float) to zoom in, increase the value to zoom out.
Look up the specs on gluPerspective for more info on why that...