OpenGL Insights website is online

It has been quite a journey but OpenGL Insights is about to be available everywhere, just in time for Siggraph 2012 and the OpenGL 20th anniversary where copies of the book will be given away during the WebGL, the OpenGL ES and the OpenGL BOFs. To get ready for the release, the OpenGL Insights website is now online!

• The complete table of content
• A list of tips. Please submit your tips to extend this page!
• The chapters' code available through github, please fork!
• The OpenGL Pipeline Map which is the online version of the poster included in the book.
• Five complete chapters to start enjoying the book!

OpenGL Insights with numbers is 52 authors, 17 technical reviewers, 2 co-editors, 679 pages, 44 chapters and 1 book that we hope you will enjoy! Thanks to all the contributors who made this book possible with their commitments!

A special thanks to Patrick for inviting me to this journey and creating the best opportunity I had to contribute to the OpenGL community.

OpenGL Insights cover based on Chapter 20, Efficient Layered Fragment Buffer Techniques, by Pyarelal Knowles, Geoff Leach, and Fabio Zambetta

New Proposal Deadline: August 25th

We are going to make our final call for authors at the OpenGL, WebGL, and Mobile BOFs at SIGGRAPH. In order to give people just hearing about the project enough time to submit, we are pushing the submission deadline from August 15th to August 25th. We are keeping the rest of the schedule the same. Christophe and I have been staying on top of the many great proposals we have received so we are confident that we can select authors in one week (by September 1st), but we would appreciate you submitting your proposal sooner than the 25th if possible.

The submission instructions are still the same, just use this example proposal.

One month left before end of submission

Update: The submission deadline is now August 25th to better accommodate SIGGRAPH.

In exactly one month, the submission period will be closed.

We have received many proposals already and even more people contacted us to let us now about their intentions to contribution to this community book.

Some authors have submitted two, three and even four proposals for the book. We think it is best to publish a maximum of two articles per author. Nevertheless, submitting multiple proposals will give us more choices especially in the case of overlap.

Are you considering writing an article for OpenGL Insights? The best advice I can give you is to contact us to let us know about your expected topic.

Thanks to everyone contributing for making this project one to remember!

Proposal Discussion at SIGGRAPH

I'm looking forward to SIGGRAPH 2011 next month. If anyone wants to meet face to face at SIGGRAPH to discuss OpenGL Insights proposal ideas, please email me, pjcozzi@siggraph.org, and we'll setup a time. My SIGGRAPH schedule is getting packed, but this project is a top priority for Christophe and I, so I will do my best to accommodate everyone.

If you won't be at SIGGRAPH, you can email us any questions or just go ahead and submit your proposal using the instructions in our Call for Authors. We have already received many great proposals, and are looking forward to many many more!

Call for Authors

It is with great enthusiasm that we invite you to contribute to OpenGL Insights, a book containing original articles on OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL techniques by the OpenGL community and for the OpenGL community: from game programmers to web developers to researchers. OpenGL Insights will be published by A K Peters Ltd. / CRC Press in time for SIGGRAPH 2012.

Given the wide array of OpenGL platforms, from Mac desktops to Android phones to web browsers, we invite you to submit article proposals on all aspects of OpenGL development, including performance tuning, recent GL features/extensions, application architecture, vendor-specific techniques, WebGL, and interoperability with other APIs. We are interested in proposals based on your unique real-world experience using OpenGL.

Topics of interest for OpenGL Insights include:

OpenGL performance, for example:
- Best performance practices for using vertex buffers
- Best performance practices for texture streaming
- Performance and memory profiling techniques
- 64-bit performance considerations
- Multithreading with OpenGL

Modern OpenGL 3 and 4 programming, for example:
- Introduction to tessellation
- Image load and store
- Programmable multisampling
- Using shader subroutines effectively
- Managing uniform data
- Strategies for debugging OpenGL applications

Application architecture, for example:
- Porting between Direct3D and OpenGL
- Writing portable code between OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and WebGL
- Designing an OpenGL-based graphics engine
- A testing framework for OpenGL applications
- Shader architecture best practices, e.g., shader binaries and separate shaders
- Cross-platform programming with OpenGL
- Tools, libraries

Vendor-specific techniques, for example:
- Understanding and optimizing for specific hardware and driver implementations: AMD, Apple, ARM, Imagination Technologies, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, S3 Graphics, etc.
- Bindless Graphics: GL_NV_shader_buffer_load and GL_NV_vertex_buffer_unified_memory
- How VAO works on AMD drivers
- Taking advantage of deferred tile rendering on PowerVR
- How GLSL compiler works
- Understanding multithreaded OpenGL drivers

OpenGL ES, for example:
- Best practices for targeting both desktop and mobile devices
- Targeting multiple mobile device platforms
- Developing with power consumption in mind
- Differences between desktop and mobile devices

WebGL, for example:
- Introduction to WebGL for web developers
- Introduction to WebGL for OpenGL developers
- Optimizing WebGL applications
- Writing large-scale software in JavaScript
- Understanding web browser implementations of WebGL
- WebGL interoperability with WebCL

Interoperability, for example:
- Hybrid OpenGL and OpenCL/CUDA rendering pipelines
- Working with both OpenGL and Direct3D
- OpenGL interoperability with OpenCL and CUDA

Inspirational thoughts and experiences:
- OpenGL's 20th anniversary: history and evolution
- ARB members and OpenGL developers interviews
- OpenGL software making of
- Daily programmer experiences with OpenGL

These are, of course, examples. Please don't feel limited to these areas.

The planned schedule is:
- August 25, 2011: Proposals due
- September 1, 2011: Authors selected
- November 1, 2011: Articles due
- December 1, 2011: Peer review feedback due
- December 15, 2011: Revised articles due, all articles sent to publisher
- January 1, 2012: Supplemental material due, e.g., videos, source code, etc.
- SIGGRAPH 2012: Book released

Please send proposals to editors@openglinsights.com using this example proposal as a template by August 25th.

Proposals should include the title, your name and affiliation, a one-page abstract, and anything else you feel helps convey your article such as related images or references. Proposals must demonstrate the author's real-world OpenGL experience and ability to write clearly. Proposals can have multiple authors, and a single author can submit multiple proposals. There is no required article length, but we expect most articles will be 5-20 pages. Example code can be written in any language on any platform.

Please feel free to contact us for additional discussion. We're looking forward to putting together a valuable book for the OpenGL community.

Thanks,
Patrick Cozzi and Christophe Riccio, OpenGL Insights' Editors