There's no real easy way to explain the third parameter. You should know that –2.0f is going to be closer to you than –5.0f. and –100.0f would be WAY into the screen. Once you get to 0.0f, the image is so big, it fills the entire monitor. Once you start going into positive values, the image no longer appears on the screen cause it has "gone past the screen". That's what I mean when I say out of the screen. The object is still there, you just can't see it anymore.
Leave the last number at 1.0f. This tells OpenGL the designated coordinates are the position of the light source. More about this in a later tutorial.
GLfloat LightPosition[]= { 0.0f, 0.0f, 2.0f, 1.0f }; // Light Position ( NEW )
The filter variable below is to keep track of which texture to display. The first texture (texture 0) is made using gl_nearest (no smoothing). The second texture (texture 1) uses gl_linear filtering which smooths the image out quite a bit. The third texture (texture 2) uses mipmapped textures, creating a very nice looking texture. The variable filter will equal 0, 1 or 2 depending on the texture we want to use. We start off with the first texture.
GLuint texture[3] creates storage space for the three different textures. The textures will be stored at texture[0], texture[1] and texture[2].
GLuint filter; // Which Filter To Use
GLuint texture[3]; // Storage for 3 textures
LRESULT CALLBACK WndProc(HWND, UINT, WPARAM, LPARAM); // Declaration For WndProc
Now we load in a bitmap, and create three different textures from it. This tutorial uses the glaux library to load in the bitmap, so make sure you have the glaux library included before you try compiling the code. I know Delphi, and Visual C++ both have glaux libraries. I'm not sure about other languages. I'm only going to explain what the new lines of code do, if you see a line I haven't commented on, and you're wondering what it does, check tutorial six. It explains loading, and building texture maps from bitmap images in great detail.
Immediately after the above code, and before ReSizeGLScene(), we want to add the following section of code. This is the same code we used in lesson 6 to load in a bitmap file. Nothing has changed. If you're not sure what any of the following lines do, read tutorial six. It explains the code below in detail.
AUX_RGBImageRec *LoadBMP(char *Filename) // Loads A Bitmap Image
{
FILE *File=NULL; // File Handle
if (!Filename) // Make Sure A Filename Was Given
{
return NULL; // If Not Return NULL
}
File=fopen(Filename,"r"); // Check To See If The File Exists
if (File) // Does The File Exist?
{
fclose(File); // Close The Handle
return auxDIBImageLoad(Filename); // Load The Bitmap And Return A Pointer
}
return NULL; // If Load Failed Return NULL
}
This is the section of code that loads the bitmap (calling the code above) and converts it into 3 textures. Status is used to keep track of whether or not the texture was loaded and created.
int LoadGLTextures() // Load Bitmaps And Convert To Textures
{
int Status=FALSE; // Status Indicator
AUX_RGBImageRec *TextureImage[1]; // Create Storage Space For The Texture
memset(TextureImage,0,sizeof(void *)*1); // Set The Pointer To NULL
Now we load the bitmap and convert it to a texture. TextureImage[0] = LoadBMP("Data/Crate.bmp") will jump to our LoadBMP() code. The file named Crate.bmp in the Data directory will be loaded. If everything goes well, the image data is stored in TextureImage[0], Status is set to TRUE, and we start to build our texture.
// Load The Bitmap, Check For Errors, If Bitmap's Not Found Quit
if (TextureImage[0]=LoadBMP("Data/Crate.bmp")) {
Status=TRUE; // Set The Status To TRUE
Now that we've loaded the image data into TextureImage[0], we'll use the data to build 3 textures. The line below tells OpenGL we want to build three textures, and we want the texture to be stored in texture[0], texture[1] and texture[2].
glGenTextures(3, &texture[0]); // Create Three Textures
In tutorial six, we used linear filtered texture maps. They require a hefty amount of processing power, but they look real nice. The first type of texture we're going to create in this tutorial uses GL_NEAREST. Basically this type of texture has no filtering at all. It takes very little processing power, and it looks real bad. If you've ever played a game where the textures look all blocky, it's probably using this type of texture. The only benefit of this type of texture is that projects made using this type of texture will usually run pretty good on slow computers.
You'll notice we're using GL_NEAREST for both the MIN and MAG. You can mix GL_NEAREST with GL_LINEAR, and the texture will look a bit better, but we're intested in speed, so we'll use low quality for both. The MIN_FILTER is the filter used when an image is drawn smaller than the original texture size. The MAG_FILTER is used when the image is bigger than the original texture size.
// Create Nearest Filtered Texture
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[0]);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_NEAREST); ( NEW )
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_NEAREST); ( NEW )
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 3, TextureImage[0]->sizeX, TextureImage[0]->sizeY, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, TextureImage[0]->data);
The next texture we build is the same type of texture we used in tutorial six. Linear filtered. The only thing that has changed is that we are storing this texture in texture[1] instead of texture[0] because it's our second texture. If we stored it in texture[0] like above, it would overwrite the GL_NEAREST texture (the first texture).
// Create Linear Filtered Texture
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, texture[1]);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_LINEAR);
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 3, TextureImage[0]->sizeX, TextureImage[0]->sizeY, 0, GL_RGB, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, TextureImage[0]->data);
Now for a new way to make textures. Mipmapping! You may have noticed that when you make an image very tiny on the screen, alot of the fine details disappear. Patterns that used to look nice start looking real bad. When you tell OpenGL to build a mipmapped texture OpenGL tries to build different sized high quality textures. When you draw a mipmapped texture to the screen OpenGL will select the BEST looking texture from the ones it built (texture with the most detail) and draw it to the screen instead of resizing the original image (which causes detail loss).