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Delphi Developer's Guide to OpenGL gives an outline of OpenGL--once a proprietary graphics library that used to reside only on expensive workstations--and explains its capabilities, including how to use it inside Borland's popular programming language, Delphi.
The book begins with a tour of creating a Delphi project that can utilise OpenGL. Over the first five chapters the book demonstrates how 3-D graphics work using popular computer graphics nomenclature as well as instructions for drawing OpenGL objects in perspective within a Delphi window and the implementation of the three different types of OpenGL lighting (ambient, specular and diffuse) upon those objects.
While the book provides great coverage on some of OpenGL's effects (fog, transparency and mapping textures to surfaces), the most important chapter is "Picking," which discusses how to detect a user's interaction with OpenGL objects, i.e., detecting a user's selection and movement of an on-screen object.
There are plenty of code snippets, and all the source code in the book can be found on the CD-ROM. However, the book completely lacks colour pictures that demonstrate the results of the techniques and the chapters on lighting, textures and special effects could've greatly benefited from them. Also, all the examples in the book use extremely primitive shapes and actions. Presumably, a talented programmer can extrapolate the viable info rom the simple examples and build more sophisticated projects.
With the proliferation of video display cards that support the OpenGL standard, applications built in popular development environments like Delphi can take advantage of real-time 3D graphics. This is a timely book, suitable for programmers with Delphi experience and some graphics programming experience, needing to get up the Delphi/OpenGL learning curve. --Mike Caputo
Product Description
Book and CD-ROM. OpenGL has long been the standard library for use on graphics workstations and is rapidly gaining ground as the graphics tool of choice in the Windows environment. With Delphi Developer's Guide to OpenGL, Delphi programmers learn how to connect OpenGL functionality to Delphi's object-oriented, event-driven model. This book is a step-by-step review of OpenGL graphics programming that quickly enables the Delphi developer to gain practical experience in the major OpenGL rendering techniques with clear, detailed examples and exercises. Through carefully planned concept building, the programmer will learn about such OpenGL skills as projection, illumination, construction of surface from polygons, and animation.
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