I started playing around with Horde3d a while back. I even made my own fork of it and messed about a bit with it. But then I realized that I don’t actually have any idea about how it renders stuff internally, and the whole point of picking it over an existing engine was so that I could modify its innards whenever I pleased. So, I decided to sit down and properly learn OpenGL.

I tried picking up OpenGL a couple of times before, but each time I would get put-off by the seemingly-arcane function calls required to display a simple triangle. This was probably compounded by the fact that all of those times I was less interested in actually learning how OpenGL works and more interested in getting amazing graphics.

This time around, I sat down with the single intention of just learning how everything works, and with absolutely no expectations or goals in mind. I’m following the excellent open.gl guide. And here’s my first rectangle.