OpenGL and Ruby
I started class once again a couple of weeks ago and it gave me a chance to take a break from Ruby and Rails and get some academics done. Well, not really a break, as one of my courses is comparative languages. First assignment will be in, yep, you guessed it, Ruby. The first exam will be some history, and some coding. The coding part, yep, Ruby.
I wanted to try something cool so took a graphics course. It uses OpenGL to go through the image rendering, 3D affects, and the like. It was cool as it gave me a chance to play around with C++ and Windows which I haven't done in a while, since MFC days. I found a great tutorial which goes through the basics and jumps right into 3D images.
Figure 1: rotating-cone-and-triangles
After playing around with my rotating-cone-and-triangles for a minute, I had to look what support Ruby has for OpenGL. Well guess what ladies and gents, yep, Ruby supports OpenGL out of the box. Here's a cool blog about starting OpenGL with Ruby from someone more experienced in graphics then me. As you can tell from my rotating-cone-and-triangles it's not that tough.
And this is really neat. There's even a Rails inspired Game Programming framework called Shattered Ruby. I haven't had any chance to play around with it but if anyone has, please let me know. It looks really cool.The OpenGL libraries for Ruby were originally written by Yoshi, and continue being developed. See the RubyForge site at htp://ruby-opengl.rubyforge.org/ for status and updates.
Some sample code available from Thomas Lee
