
Transitioning Students to
Post-Deprecation OpenGL
Mike Bailey
2.1 Introduction
Fr om an educator’s perspective, teaching OpenGL in the past has been a snap. The
separation of geometry from topology in the glBegin-glEnd, the simplicity of
glVertex3f, and the classic organization of the postmultiplied transformation ma-
trices has been fast and easy to explain. This has considerably excited the students
because going from zero knowledge to “cool 3D program you can smugly show your
friends” was the task of a single lesson. This made motivation easy.
The Great OpenGL Deprecation has changed that. Creating and using vertex
buffer objects is a lot more time ...