the most replayed part 💀

When a normal person sees you make you first triangle: 😪 When a graphics programmer sees you make your first triangle: Here you go king 👑

When Unity fucked up so bad people rather reinvent the wheel.

It's a good day when Garbaj uploads a video.

Started learning OpenGL 3 months ago with the goal of creating a UI library and then a game engine. Only now I think I have a good enough grasp on it to start working on a real project rather than experiments. It's very fun to mess around with and the performance you get in your own engine is absolutely insane. I can draw 500 cubes to the screen with lighting and still have 4000fps (literally) easy

Honestly, it just takes time to learn OpenGL and make complex stuff. I'd be happy if you continued on.

I love trying to make 3d engines. such a fun project to work on. great job!

This was an interesting video to watch, thank you for making it! And also make sure to make videos of other such journeys of yours :)

For simple model importing, just look at obj. The ANSI version is rather trivial (and human readable), so all you have to do is read a text file. You can ignore stuff not implemented yet (like textures/UVs) and it should still work. But such experiments are great, considering all this knowledge (math and brain mush included) can be used e.g. when working with vertex shaders, too.

It's a good start and please don't give up on your engine. I have tried making graphics engines several times in the past, and they all ended up as abandoned projects in different stages of completion. But every time I got further and further. Only after I matured my software engineering skills enough that I was finally able to put things together in a way that they would not need to be tore down everytime I needed to add a new feature. Making your engine is a challenging and yet extremely rewarding process that will help you grow as a problem-solver. Keep at it mate :)

Based vid for naming the dva mod. Yeah and something=something about graphic rendering

For the really crazy stuff you should give jdh a chance. This guy is doing some wild magic with his own engines, OSs and self made graphic cards

OUR QUEEN RETURNS!!! (I don't mean to put pressure on you, these take a lot of effort to make! Just excited to see you in my subscriptions feed!)

nice, Unity kinda shot themselves in the foot and it’s nice to see people’s alternatives!

Yooo he uploaded!! Glad to see you've been keeping up with programming.

i love when people go back to absolute basics. Goes over my head more often than not, but it's incredibly fun to watch.

I love it when I randomly start thinking about something and its just happens the next day or two, I was wondering when you would post again.

as an engine dev, you are in for a ride buddy.

this is really wholesome and reminiscent to a graphics engine i tried to make a year ago, i managed to add basic 3D model importer for it and i gave up when i started dealing with basic lighting and shadows.

Tonight, I just made an even more basic 3D renderer using C# and WinForms. No OpenGL, no DirectX, not even a way to define a 3D point, and I "finished" it in about 3 days. It wasn't that hard, the only two difficult parts were getting a perspective projection matrix working and defining the 36 3D points and 12 triangles that made up the cube I rendered. This video was my biggest inspiration for the project, though I've been wanting to work on something like this for a few weeks now. Planning on using meshes and mesh files to speed up the process of the creating new 3D shapes, as well as on camera / object movement and rotation.

Building an engine is an immense task. That's why Unity, Lumberyard, Frostbite, Creation, Unreal, etc. last so long. It's a crazy task to build a new one.

nice to see you back

I feel this. Way back in the day I started with the NeHe (Neon Helium) OpenGL tutorials. Really old stuff now, but getting that first triangle, or spinning cube. It's always the same route it seems. :D Congratulations on the progress! Edit: Oh I can also greatly recommend looking into SDL2 if you haven't yet.

Here's to hoping we'll see a custom game engine renaissance happen again

Devs of the game Haydee knew exactly what the players want

This video was cute and it made me smile. And then I realized it was a Garbaj video, dude, your stuff is nice, thanks!

I think it's good to make (or just try) to create your own game engine, to understand how to they work. I'm working in my very own GE intermittently for the last nine months based in a project from a JAM 12 years ago. I don't regret but it is too hard and still far to be "usable".

Years ago I decided to make my own (bad) game and graphics engine. Though it wasn't great, it did allow me to learn a lot of about how these engines actually work, which made me both appreciate and understand tools like Godot more! Now, I can confidently work on some pretty advance tools, plugins and engine extensions, I better understand what can cause lag, and I overall feel more empowered having gone though that journey. Personally, I don't plan on revisiting such low-level things unless I have too, such as making a game for PSX or contributing to Godot, if ever I do.

You know why I clicked. The video preview was on spot.

This is always an awesome experience! Back in 2018-2019 I'd do a lot of different mini game engines with SDL/GLFW/etc, some using opengl, others directx, others libraries like SFML etc or event from zero like setting up a win32 layer and all. Nowadays I think I'd use RayLib. It's pretty compact and small and it has model/animation loading as well as many 3D methods to interact with models using raycasting which are useful and hard to implement if you're just starting to learn these things. Of course you won't have a lighting system buy you have all the model, shading and texturing loading with nice examples and you are left with the single problem of solving lighting youself instead of having to solve animations as well for example. Nice video!

So this is what you have been up to. Good to finally hear from you mate

Being talented enough to attempt such feat. Must be a good feeling.

Hi Garbaj, Welcome to the 3d world scene, good progress so far, it took me a while to understand some concepts, following along with a few different tutorials did not help either, some used old opengl ( fixed pipeline, which isn't bad if you want to play around with opengl to get a feel of things), others done modern opengl... and some done a mixture which raised soo many bugs and wasted time ::/ (below: lighting | under da hood | Framebuffer | ) I would say leave the lighting until you're 100% happy with everything else, it is just another resource that will be used when it is not needed in early stages, by all means you can start on it and not call it, but every time you'll go test out your work, you will always think "hmm What would it look like with light"... As far as "more under the hood", in what terms was you thinking, I believe there are some of us who "JUST'S NEEDS TO KNOW WHY" things work :) See below(bottom-ish maybe) if you're on a nix box ( linux machine ), you could play around with the fb ( framebuffer), you can even use python, to write out to it, so there is no GL/SDL/GLFW needed, as the FB file just contains pixel data informations < hope this helps a little. As for the under the hood here is some information that you may have seen already but could help others: you will have to look into reverse engineering your own work and putting many debug statements (a call function that = (printf HELLO WE ARE HERE 1.... 2.... 3->1000)), because each function you call with opengl will set certain registers on the CPU, to allow you to talk to the GPU, once communication has been made ( accepted ) more data is sent to the GPU that will set registers on the GPU ( as far as i know we can not view them) however we can view the memory/ stack to see what is pushed / popped. to get a grasp on how things may work, it will be beneficial for you to get a copy of your graphics architecture specs, that will sometimes display the registers so you can get an idea how information is passed through etc, if you have an AMD card then your luck has changed, because AMD does released their documents... Sooo many Documents, Perhaps ask chatGPT what type of documents that could help you out, anyways this messages has gotten rather long, good luck on your quest and keep us updated!! I hope that scratch gets itched ;-)

Good job for going so far ! I find the OpenGL documentation really hard to understand, but with a bit of reflection & some tutorials (from ThinMatrix on UKposts especially) I managed to create a small game engine using opengl, it currently handles shaders, materials, lighing, instancing, input, etc. I am currently working on the audio using OpenAL but it might take some time 😌

Keep going on your game engine! :)

I think it's great that you've at least tried expanding your horizons, even if they didn't end up going that far. I know I wouldn't've done that :D

Fun little bit of pedantry: it's not quite the basis of all 3D... but most 3D. There are voxels, point-clouds, signed-distance fields, et cetera... and if you are rasterizing those, then yeah, you still end up back in a triangle (one that you might not even create manually), but if you're doing a path-tracer, and your scene is made of SDF objects or voxels, or whatever, then there's no triangle ... unless you are looking at a triangle... Regardless, glad to see more people getting their hands dirty with this stuff.

I recommend using assimp which supports a lot of formats and is easy to use. also look into basic shading (like phong and toon) as well as take a peak into deferred lighting. good work on the engine though, ive been personally expereimenting with vulkan which is like opengl but way more in-depth. My brain is toasted from it.

Awesome ! That looks great ! Keep it up !

Good to see you again, Garbaj!

I started coding mine in 2007, made it as far as making a couple of 1-level demos, ported it to linux and then to PSP, all was going well then I started learning GLSL and that's what entirely killed my enthusiasm.

Keep up the good work man 🥳😄

Coding in open GL is simultaneously the most interesting and infuriating thing I’ve done. But I’m super glad I’ve done it even if I do work with engines as you get a sneak peak out not just how render pipelines and lighting work but also the base starting level of every engine out there

took a computer graphics course in college and it was easily one of the hardest classes I've ever taken. Had to make a raycaster and it was very buggy

Yeah I fell into this hole as well! Welcome to the fun, I have yet to progress. :'D

I too am trying to learn how to make one for paticular projects I have in mind. But Im wanting to use BGFX for one of them. I aim to make first 2 to run with low end hardware smooth as I can get it. Nice work sofar btw, hoping you start making it able to serve the games you want to do with it.

As someone learning software engineering I have to give you high praise on a job well done. By doing this you've shown your mettle with programming, you have a great future ahead of you sir garbage.

UKposts recommended this video to me on the home page, I'm glad to see people trying to write graphics engines, I've been trying too. It's only just that I hoped it was DirectX

Thanks for not turn this into a "how I make a full feature game engine in a weekend because I'm genius and figure everything out in a tackle" video. For those who had tried graphic engine APIs knows how challenging is to make a textured cube on the screen.

weird that I happened to see this while im taking my computer graphics course because this is exactly what ive done this semester, only got to the part where I can create artifacts and apply textures to them, and I dont see the class going any further.

The 3 month wait for a new garbaj video was worth it

Lol nice job. I highly recommend binge-watching Ben Eater's series on building a graphics card using only breadboard connections.

I thought yesterday man its been a minute since I have seen a garbaj upload

This is completely out there, but I wonder if you could collab with Road to Vostok dev. He's also making a game by himself and as far as he told us in the dev videos, he was also rewriting stuff. Not sure if it was his own engine as well for the game because ~UNITY~ things, but something along those lines. And I find the idea interesting that the 2 of you suddenly come up with a basic yet robust new engine.

i think that's a huge first step

Everyone has to start somewhere, but not everyone will. You did, so good job

1:25 im glad you know your audience

this guys is REALLY good, especially his SDL2 tutorial (which in general is a nightmare to find on the internet)

I made an engine in OGL for my CG fundamentals class and once you get the foundation done (texture loading, model loading, uniforms, eyc) it's really rewarding to add stuff later, like PBR and IBL. I'm trying to create a Vulkan game engine now. Vulkan is kicking my ass though.

It's good that you tried, but sounds like a nice project to come back to.

The bump in viewer retention when DVA is in the video 😂

when you realize 1:24 is the most replayed you start to see the game dev community true colors 💀

this channel name had me rolling

Great! Also, I started learning opengl a few days ago

Careful going down that rabbit hole. I spent 8 years doing this. Learned a whole lot, but I feel like I wasted a lot of time I could have spent on other projects.

Great work man

welcome back:)

If you think OpenGL is hard, you never want to try Vulkan. Setting up OpenGL is trivial in comparison (except for loading functions but even then GLAD has you covered) as the driver and OS will initiate the context and client/server connection to the GPU. Vulkan requires creating instances, querying and selecting physical devices to create logical devices, manual memory management, graphics pipelines and caching and so many lower level details. But when done properly can result in extremely optimized and graphically impressive works like Doom Eternal.

a very interesting video and i love the conclusion of hey at least i made it :3

I'm a rendering programmer by trade and I can say quite confidently that it doesn't ever stop with feeling overwhelming or like there always being a more complex thing to learn 😅 Rendering is such an in depth discipline and requires such depths of knowledge anywhere from physics to photography or painting to statistics; so no one person can ever truly know it it all imo and it's always best to take comfort in that 😉 I would suggest, given you're starting out, just pursue what you're finding fun! If you start looking into a topic and are feeling overwhelmed please don't be too discouraged! It's perfectly fine to put that topic down to come back to later and try something else for a bit 🙂 E.g. You mentioned that you struggled with the model importer and lighting. So why not place them down for a moment. For models, why don't you try making basic levels out of cubes and then move towards having those levels/models read in from your own simple file format? It would give you an appreciation for what sort of information is included and how it flows through the graphics pipeline whilst still being grounded in something you know. For lighting start simple! Don't worry about shadows for now, just worry about the 3 building blocks: diffuse (The base brightness of a surface), specular (The "shiny" spots on surfaces) and ambient (The background colour you get from light that, irl bounces from object to object) There are many resources on basic lighting thankfully! Once you're feeling comfortable with those, it then opens up the opportunity to dip your toes into most other lighting topics/sub disciplines 🙂 Hopefully this was helpful!

Thats just how it is it becomes more complex but if you keep doing it eventually you will get the hang of it, some of it, its not only you I watch other people try and be disapointed how little they can do.

I used OpenGL and built a little 2d framework, animating sprites, collision using a texture, etc... Had Ayala from Chrono Trigger running around, it felt good when it finally worked. That was before Unity broke the market and offered all features for free starting with Unity 5, gotta give them props for that. People forget Unreal was expensive as hell, most engines were, until Unity broke the dam, didn't mess with OpenGL since.

I'm sure if you get to this project after a while you'll be 1000% better at it. Our brain needs time to understand things, sometimes, it's real time, like a month.

very good! congratulations

Thats cool! I coded a realtime and raytracing engine myself with raw 2D shapes but never learnt OpenGL. So thanks for the quick overview since I may wanna touch it at some point because the performance in my (single-threaded purely cpu based) realtime 3D engine is... not the best😅

making a model loader is quite easy. just check the .obj file structure and then structure that data so that it fits your vertex specification.

the challenge of this is a lot more than most would think, but as you mentioned most of the difficulty comes from the requirement of memorizing openGL, unless you use an already existing library but thats boring xD its all about the learning

It took me 1 year until I was capable to create a basic OpenGL renderer on my own (kinda), 1 more year until I was capable of doing PBR stuff. Recently, my engine ended up being toast but gonna fix it, trying something less hardcore. OpenGL has some quirks, and works in a black-box kind of way which is annoying and difficult to debug, but as a complete API it's good enough for an indie. Trying to learn Vulkan as well, but the gigantic amount of boilerplate code is overwhelming and I don't have anything working nicely on it. Other APIs are kinda single-platform (DirectX, Metal) or unfinished (WebGPU, SDL GPU API), so in the end OpenGL is still the best option for indies or beginners. You can kinda simplify the stuff with wrappers or libraries such as sokol-gfx (wrapper for OpenGL/WebGL/DirectX/Metal for C/C++) or raylib (mini-engine/library for C/C++). There are other options for other languages as well (there are several bindings for raylib for example)

Cool stuff. I’m trying something similar. Write a render pipeline (structurally identical to the gpu) but in software, to understand better what’s happening under the hood. It’s quite fun, educating and frustrating. 😅 Learning and implementing the whole matrix projection/transform and homogenous vector stuff was quite entertaining. And to my surprise i implemented it correctly. Only odd thing, I seem to using it wrong. As soon as I add perspective projection into it, the output looks crazy. I also, gracefully, ignored the rasteriser and just use regular 2d painting apis (html canvas or skia) after the vertex shader. Once the projection works, I will look into the rasteriser.

Idk a damn thing about this stuff. But I do have an appreciation for being a maker of things. I myself am a lampworker and it's always funny to me to listen to both sides of the isle. Maker vs consumer. Consumers always have wants and needs or questions like "why didn't they just do this or that" and it's like "ok, then go make it" and then you get that eye roll lol and it's like yeah, now you know what I'm dealing with😆 Much like star citizen taking forever to finish, or starfield not having features everyone wants. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. This a bunny trial comment, but it was interesting to see what goes into it, nice vid😊

"Eventually you're going to want to add more detail." Yeah, I got as far as drawing a triangle, coloring the vertices, and making it spin. That was enough OpenGL for me lol :D

Good luck!

legend

Thanks for the DvA

Imagine the people that build *WHOLE OPERATING SYSTEMS!* that’s insane!

YAYYY GARBAJ IS BACK :D

What a coincidence, I just had my first ever OpenGL experience too! I only made a fragment shader tho, no fancy 3d.

This is quite an ambitious task, happy to see you got so far. Have you tried making your own game engine though? I ask because I heard about somebody (Codemonkey made a vid about him) who thought it was better to learn a coding language in and out before you make a game with it.

I at first thought that you went with Vulkan which I would have applauded. I do recommend learning it or Webgpu since that api is a bit easier to learn than Vulkan but it is modern, cross platform and supports the web.

Talking to OpenGL is actually the easiest part of making a game engine. The hard part is building systems for meshes, textures, transforms, and scene trees around it in a way that is both robust and flexible at the same time. I'm at the point with my project where actual OpenGL code only makes up 10% of it, so I'm thinking about switching to Vulkan right away. It would actually make some things easier, since even the most recent OpenGL version is still somewhat stuck in the past conceptually.

Haha I just spent the last few months doing basically this, I made a pretty simple 2d physics engine with just opengl and glad, and just last week I ported it to 3d and added obj loading. It's fun! (and learnopengl is a godsend at the beginning)

Inspiring!

the most replayed part of this video is quite sus

In first year at uni I decided it would be a good idea to apply math 101 and make a 3D engine from scratch without any OpenGL or DirectX. It worked some of the time and was dog slow. But it ran on Java for mobile in the age of dumb phones.

I tried to do my own thing with graphics too, but in my case, wgpu with Rust lang. It was... a LOT of setup for basically nothing, and when it just abruptly stopped working, I was like "okay, FINE, let's just use Bevy." since Bevy has its own render pipeline and... basically everything I set up in wgpu is doable with Bevy in like ten minutes. But, that's just me... I thought about OpenGL, but its rust bindings are apparently subpar, and I didn't feel like learning C (or C++) so here I am. But all in all... SUPER cool to learn how graphics are done and how exactly the pipeline works so if I really need to get in there and tweak something, I'll at least somewhat know what I'm doing!

most replayed part. not surprised.

All my OpenGL homies hate apple for deprecating it on all apple devices. But jokes aside, OpenGL is great for starting with your graphics programming adventure. I was a part of a team writing a custom engine and a game. We tried to force Vulkan at the beginning of the project to make a "modern" engine, but after a month of stuggling with Vulkan we rewrote the entire month's progress in OpenGL in one day and finished the engine (and a game on it) in the next two months. It was a great experience. To sum it up: OpenGL and chill, Vulkan and existential crisis.

Making your first OpenGL triangle is the equivalent to a blender doughnut.

Thanks for the video

If you really wanna get intimate with the graphics pipeline, write a software renderer.