Request to access the wiki

[SHC]

Hello everybody,

I've recently observed that my tutorial series has been added to the "Learning LWJGL" page in the wiki. I'm happy about it, but I had moved them to my own site for flexibility over content and formatting. Can I have access to the wiki to change the link to the new location? The new location is at http://goharsha.com/lwjgl-tutorial-series/

Or can a moderator change that for me? Anything is okay for me.

Thanks.

[quew8]

Well I can't give you access but I have changed it for you. http://lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Learning_LWJGL, is this to your satisfaction?

[SHC]

@quew8

Thank you very much. And by the way, can I have your feedback on the updated tutorials? You helped me a lot previously when I was writing the tutorials at JGO.

[quew8]

So I started looking through your tutorials with the intention of giving you a few pointers but I very quickly descended into an in depth reading and taking notes, whether this is because the tutorials were so engaging or simply because I like to pick holes in other people's work I do not know. Either way I have a few notes on all the tutorials up to the one about VAOs, and can I just say that they are very good - mostly what I have is typos with a few little suggestions for you to think about.

The Intro

LWJGL is just a wrapper for OpenGL

People keep saying this, but I feel like it really doesn't give LWJGL credit for all the native windowing stuff and utilities LWJGL provides which are in some ways the really impressive bits of LWJGL. That's just one of my little obsessions, sorry.

A basic Game
(This is probably the only thing I thought was actually wrong with these tutorials) You just jump in and say "this class will handle our game loop for us." Back in the day before I started game development I would have had no idea what a game loop was. Maybe that''s just me but a little description couldn't hurt.

Similarly but not that important, you just start talking about PixelFormat s and ContextAttrib s. Just the briefest description might help.

In the docs for your setDisplayMode() method, you say it returns "True" when it really returns "true." I think this is just me and my dislike for python coming through but whatever.

The Rendering Pipeline
You say "is called as rendering pipeline" when you mean "is called therendering pipeline"

Just tell the beginners what a fragment is. The name is a little misleading in my opinion.

Introduction to Shaders
You say "fragment shader colorises it" you mean "fragment shader colours (or colors for the Americans) it"

Suggestion: perhaps link to a full GLSL language tutorial. I don't know if you intend to write one or what but I might suggest (shameless plug) my own syntax tutorial from the wiki http://lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=GLSL_Tutorial:_Syntax or the Lighthouse3D which I link at the bottom of my tutorial although the Lighthouse is about the shaders as well as the syntax.

Encapsulating Shaders
(Just a thought I had at this point) I don't think you ever actually give any guidance on setting up a project to use LWJGL (linking libraries and natives etc.). A link to the Wiki's page on setting it up in the intro should be enough.

It might be a good idea to link to the OpenGL function documentation (probably in the intro as well) rather than saying Google it. The official docs are very good, there are some other less than good results too.

I was confused at first as to what FileUtils was. I know you link it at the end but maybe reference that link when you actually use it in code.

The First Triangle
Typos:
"about from where" -> "from where"
"And by the way, The coordinates" -> "And by the way, the coordinates"
"because of the performance reasons" -> "because of performance reasons" (not technically wrong but doesn't quite make sense as you haven't actually talked about any performance reasons before.)
"and say OpenGL to" -> "and tell OpenGL to"

Two things that I thought could maybe do with some explaining for a newbie: when you talk about the clockwise order for vertex winding and when you say "enable the location."

And finally I though a little section on Direct Java NIO Buffers might be of help (maybe this is the wrong place for that). Before starting LWJGL, I had never used NIO Buffers before (despite having done quite a bit of Java) so the tiniest explanation of the position, limit and capacity and the associated functions might be in order. And a note that they have to be direct so to always create them through the BufferUtils.

Vertex Buffer Objects / Vertex Array Objects
You mention that there are other buffer targets but if it was me I would actually tell them what they are so that when they read about PBOs / IBOs etc. they have a vague idea of what is being talked about. (You have a tutorial on "Element Buffer Objects" I have just noticed which I haven't read but I presume that is IBOs (despite them being called that in OpenGL I have never seen them called that anywhere else) so maybe you talk about them there)

I see that you unbind the Buffers before you delete them. I've never done that before so presumably it's not required so is it good practice or what?

It might be a good idea to talk about (what I call) the OpenGL Object model by which I mean the whole creation, ids, binding, binding targets, deletion etc. You talk about these things but if you just say that these are concepts shared throughout OpenGL then it'll probably help a lot when it comes to doing textures and FBOs. (I now notice you've done a tutorial on textures - again I haven't read it so maybe you do just this there).



And that's it for now. Sorry if I'm being stupid and spamming your thread with nonsense. I'll carry on looking through them tomorrow (I'm actually enjoying reading them, it's just a matter of time) and if you'd like me to do this elsewhere (email or whatever) then just let me know.

[SHC]

Thank you very much @quew8, your feedback is very helpful to me, I'm going to change them now. If you are interested, I would like to have more feedback from you, that can be of immense help to me. You can reach me at sriharshach@goharsha.com

Thank you for offering to help me.