General Information

General information regarding programming issues, which may be relevant to the projects, will be presented here.

• C++ for C/Java programmers: If you know C or Java and would like a "quick" summary of the major features of C++, please check out the handout A Short Introduction to C++. For a more systematic and complete presentation of the differences, see C++ Annotations by Frank B. Brokken.
• Project Submission: Programming assignments are submitted through the Submit Server. After clicking this link, you will be asked to login using your University directory ID. Note that we will not do any testing through the submit server—you will simply upload a bundle containing all your submission files. As a favor to the TA, please remove large binary files that are not needed to execute your program (compiled object files, executable files, other junk generated by the compiler.) Also, remember to include in your submission a ReadMe.txt file, which explains to the TA how to compile and execute your program. If you don't spot the project or have any questions, please send an email either to Dave Mount or the TA.
• OpenGL Error Checking: OpenGL does not report errors, but it is possible to query OpenGL to determine whether an error has occurred. This is done with the procedure glGetError. A simple procedure for checking errors (both in C++ and C) can be found here.
• Animation Speed Control: Because different systems and different rendering contexts require a different amount of time to process, it is useful to have a procedure that returns the wall-clock time. This is provided by the system function ftime. A code snippet that extracts millisecond counts can be found here.
• Issues with exit on Windows: If you are compiling your program on a Microsoft Windows machine and you encounter the following error message:
  
  
  error C2381: 'exit' : redefinition; __declspec(noreturn) differs
  
  it appears to be due to an incompatibility in GLUT's definition of the exit function and the system's definition. After searching for a while, I found the solution here. (In particular, I added "GLUT_BUILDING_LIB" to my preprocessor defintions.)

Project 1

• Resources: We have put together a zip file containing Project-1 Resources. It includes a sample executable (for Windows only), source code for some utility code, and a file that contains many of the numeric parameters used in our program (e.g., the speeds, sizes, and colors). If you do not have a Windows machine but would like to see our executable, I've uploaded a short (rather low-quality) screen capture using Fraps. It can be found on Youtube.

Project 2

• Resources: We have put together a zip file containing Project-2 Resources. It includes a sample executable (for Windows only), source code for some utility code, and a file that contains many of the numeric parameters used in our program (e.g., the colors, models, camera parameters, and lights). If you do not have a Windows machine but would like to see our executable, I've uploaded a short (rather low-quality) screen capture using Fraps. It can be found on Youtube.
• Objects: I have put together a short file containing a description of the main objects used in my implementation of Project 2. It can be found here.