About backwards compatibility and tutorials.

Started by Starless, June 10, 2016, 16:09:53

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Starless

Hi, I'm new here.

From what I could gather searching the forums, version 3.x is not backwards compatible with 2.x, and since I'm just starting the issue of learning material comes into play. Most tutorials are for version 2, and the series I found for version 3 are still incomplete. So I have two questions:

My main purpose of learning LWJGL is understanding Minecraft code better, because I'm a Minecraft modder. I will, off course, write little games and applications as exercises and, who knows, I may even become attached to one of those projects and actually doing something worth. So, what version of LWJGL Minecraft 1.9.4 uses? Does it loads 3 or 2 dynamically or something like that depending on what you have installed, having a layer of abstraction to make it possible? Or does it use exclusively 3 or 2, which will dictate what version should I learn.

In case the answer for the question above is "for better understanding Minecraft, go for version X", my follow up question is: where can I find the best source of learning material, like tutorials, lessons, cookbooks, etc? (official documentation of a library is a great thing, but as reference material, not for learning)

Thank you.

quew8

Well last I checked Minecraft used LWJGL 2. As I recall not even the latest one.

As for tutorials, I'd still maintain that the old wiki is the best place to go for the basics http://wiki.lwjgl.org/wiki/Main_Page but be warned that learning LWJGL is just scratching the surface. OpenGL is what you will really need to know to mess around with the core of Minecraft. And knowing OpenGL well enough to change someone else's quite substantial code base in any significant way is no quick or simple task.

Starless

Quote from: quew8 on June 11, 2016, 19:47:37
Well last I checked Minecraft used LWJGL 2. As I recall not even the latest one.

As for tutorials, I'd still maintain that the old wiki is the best place to go for the basics http://wiki.lwjgl.org/wiki/Main_Page but be warned that learning LWJGL is just scratching the surface. OpenGL is what you will really need to know to mess around with the core of Minecraft. And knowing OpenGL well enough to change someone else's quite substantial code base in any significant way is no quick or simple task.

Thank you for the reply. I'll learn as much as I can. About OpenGL, all tutorials use that old style with glBegin()/glEnd(). I like that, it's much easier than all the Buffers and Binding this to that, omg, the newer versions of OpenGL are really hard. I couldn't draw a simple triangle when trying to learn! I don't know if minecraft still does things the old way or not.

Currently, I'm developing a little LWJGL game as a learning exercise. :)

quew8

Judging from the settings in Minecraft, again not very up to date information, I think it has both an old and new rendering path to support older graphics cards.