In Review

In this tutorial, you have learned about the following:

Further Study

There are several things you can test to see what happens with these tutorials.

  • With vertCalcOffset.cpp, change it so that it draws two triangles moving in a circle, with one a half loopDuration ahead of the other. Simply change the uniforms after the glDrawArrays call and then make the glDrawArrays call again. Add half of the loop duration to the time before setting it the second time.

  • In fragChangeColor.cpp, change it so that the fragment program bounces between firstColor and secondColor, rather than popping from secondColor back to first at the end of a loop. The first-to-second-to-first transition should all happen within a single fragLoopDuration time interval. In case you are wondering, GLSL supports the if statement, as well as the ?: operator. For bonus points however, do it without an explicit conditional statement; feel free to use a sin or cos function to do this.

  • Using our knowledge of uniforms, go back to Tutorial 2's FragPosition tutorial. Modify the code so that it takes a uniform that describes the window's height, rather than using a hard-coded value. Change the reshape function to bind the program and modify the uniform with the new height.

OpenGL Functions of Note

glBufferSubData

This function copies memory from the user's memory address into a buffer object. This function takes a byte offset into the buffer object to begin copying, as well as a number of bytes to copy.

When this function returns control to the user, you are free to immediately deallocate the memory you owned. So you can allocate and fill a piece of memory, call this function, and immediately free that memory with no hazardous side effects. OpenGL will not store the pointer or make use of it later.

glGetUniformLocation

This function retrieves the location of a uniform of the given name from the given program object. If that uniform does not exist or was not considered in use by GLSL, then this function returns -1, which is not a valid uniform location.

glUniform*

Sets the given uniform in the program currently in use (set by glUseProgram) to the given value. This is not merely one function, but an entire suite of functions that take different types.

GLSL Functions of Note

vec mod(vec numerator,
 float denominator);
 

The mod function takes the modulus of the numerator by the denominator. The modulus can be thought of as a way of causing a loop; the return value will be on the range [0, denominator) in a looping fashion. Mathematically, it is defined as numerator - (denominator * FLOOR(numerator / denominator)), where FLOOR rounds a floating-point value down towards the smallest whole number.

The type vec can be either float or any vector type. It must be the same type for all parameters. If a vector denominator is used, then the modulus is taken for each corresponding component. The function returns a vector of the same size as its numerator type.

vec cos(vec angle);
 
vec sin(vec angle);
 

Returns the trigonometric cosine or sine, respectively, of the given angle. The angle is given in units of radians. If the angle is a vector, then the returned vector will be of the same size, and will be the cosine or sine of each component of the angle vector.