Hello,
So I’ve started playing with OpenGL running under Fedora Core 2 and I’ve got a textured, lit polygon being displayed (yay!)
However, I’ve now looked at doing something more useful and I really can’t believe what I’m seeing.
So OpenGL doesn’t support any kind of matrix or vector ? I can’t just get an object, and set it’s matrix directly ?
I.e. I’ve got an object’s points, it’s triangle list, and I know it’s look at and position. I can’t just whack this straight into the object matrix ? I’ve got to build it up from rotations and translations ? This seems really inefficient, or have I missed something somewhere ?
Also, there is no camera matrix ? So I guess I can just pretend there is, invert it, and concat the inverse camera matrix to my object matrices ? Er, no, it looks like I can’t ? So given this, how is it possible to do anything in OpenGL ? How can I have an arbitary camera in an arbitary room with objects placed in arbitary positions ? So far, it doesn’t look like it’s possible without a LOT of awkward maths.
Please help, I’ve come so far!