I just saw the exciting news that a skilled team has been formed and that new lessons may be on the way. Might I make a suggestion? When your team are coding tutorials, would it not be a good idea to steer clear of structuring everything around C++ classes? Classes are best used once you know all about an underlying system and you can *then* begin to encapsulate evrything to hide implementation details. Someone coming along to OpenGL to learn it from scratch will likely have a harder time working through what is happening with basic OpenGL calls if they are wrapped up in classes. Understanding OpenGL and how it works on a more procedural level first will ensure that things remain clear for both those users who only know C as well as C++ experts. Leave it to the end-user to decide how best to encapsulate OpenGL in classes once they know it intimately. Plus everyone has very different approaches on designing and writing classes, so it's best to leave this higher-level structuring out of code that aims to provide clear tutorial information on a lower level API that isn't itself class based. Keep up the great work :)

We intend to introduce object orientated programming early on, and this has pretty much been decided on. We chose this plan of action for various reasons. Some reasons include that you will need to learn OOP at some point in your life, I realize that there are many beginners who may not know OOP from the start. How ever it is already considered standard practice and is no longer 1980.

We will be explaining the tutorials much better then the current tutorials though. The other consideration was because there is a large drive on gamedev to encourage the use of C# for beginners. This being a factor assuming that they have used C# they will feel more comfortable with OOP related subjects in the future then if we were teaching it when it was not around.

Some of us know personally that it can be hard to learn OOP but the benefits are well above the downfalls. Many beginners also tend to take what they learn first and use that for a large portion of there life, we are enforcing a good coding practice by doing so. This way there will be better coders out there as a whole. We also will ideally be including links to help aid you learning OOP if you are struggling. There is always gamedev as well.

We had quite a long discussion on this, and this was chosen for various reasons. We took quite a lot of consideration on this subject before deciding.

As DevLiquidKnight said, we had a long discussion on the topic. We ultimately decided to go with OOP because beginners tend to emulate the first things they see in the tutorials. We are trying to keep things both up to par with standard coding practices and also easily understandable; the first classes you see will use very simple oop.

Thanks for your comments and please keep them comming :) Community feedback is very important to us.

Cheers,
- llvllatrix

Quick! everyone download Jeff's tuts while you still can, before they're lost to the corporate agenda forever.



Then again since all the other sites out there have already cut and pasted them into their own tutorials we don't really have anything to worry about. ;p

I believe we intend to provide links to download the old lessons.

Quote: Original post by darrenecm
Someone coming along to OpenGL to learn it from scratch will likely have a harder time working through what is happening with basic OpenGL calls if they are wrapped up in classes.

The current state of the new lesson base code does not wrap any OpenGL calls up in classes. It only encapsulates the creation of the OpenGL window. So in short, the beginning lessons, while OOP in nature, will still have naked OpenGL calls so the users can understand what OpenGL is doing, rather than what our classes are doing.

Do you plan on continuing to provide the variations of the base code? I wrote the C# basecode about two years ago and I've been trying to get NeHe to post updates several times. Now that someone else is maintaining it, I'd like to get an update in. Of course, if you are pulling that part of the site, there isn't much point in it! :)

I believe we intend to leave/have variations of base code. Perhaps not initially though, we have quite a lot of code to make new. It might be a good idea to try and follow our soon to be released new base codes though. It may be fine to do it with the old ones though. [smile]

Hi,

Why not just move the old tutorials and articles to an "old tutorials/articles" section and then build the new tutorials in a completely new section of the site?

Also, which language is being used?

Thanks,
Luke.