Hello! I’ve been trying to learn opengl for the millionth time - clicked and copy-pasted my way through various tutorials, had loads of frustration whenever my simple triangle would not display on the screen, and then suffered further as I slowly built up an absurd and unmanageable bunch of source code that hardly does anything. I am finding OpenGL far too difficult and confusing and want to know of a simpler way to draw things on the screen.
Is there any C/C++ library that provides a fairly low-level abstraction on top of OpenGL? Something that I can import meshes and textures and such into, but not a full game engine. Something like threejs but for C++?
Low-Level and Object-Oriented is kind of a contradiction with OpenGL.
In java there is LWJGL (the Light Weight Java Gaming Library) which is a low-level binding for OpenGL but with a little bit less error potential by design.
The more object oriented the framework becomes the less low-level it will be.
a “graphics engine” can help you drawing, if you dont understand how to load / what to do with textures / meshes / etc, a low-level API (that is openGL) doesnt help you any further
No. Such a thing wouldn’t be much use for learning. The main issue is that performance usually matters, which means that you need to manage your data in a way that’s convenient for OpenGL, which means understanding exactly what OpenGL is doing. Any kind of abstraction is likely to get in the way of that.
There is OGLPlus. I don’t know if this is still relevant (never used it).
You might also be interested in bgfx. This is not just an abstraction over OpenGL, but this is a complete rendering library which is also compatible with DirectX and other libraries.
[QUOTE=larryl;1287649]I’m also a newbie and unaware of any abstractions of OpenGL.
I would recommend that you take a crack at this tutorial before giving up.
It’s highly regarded in this forum.[/QUOTE]
What a coincidence, I’d just started that tutorial a few days before receiving this reply! I’ve actually managed with it much better than I ever did with open.gl or any other tutorials!