OpenGL Programming on Linux

The project, for all the work-teams in our course, is now finished as far as it involved students working on a programming project whose results professors would evaluate. I finished the final “product” pretty much alone and about a week before all the other teams. In the end, our game client probably had the greatest number of features, the most complex graphics, the nicest explosions and the most reliable motion engine—and we got the highest marks possible on the final evaluation by the professors. Somehow, I think that if I had not been able to run everything on my home Linux machine, and do everything when I wanted it and how I wanted it, I probably would not have reached this level of achievement.

Other than showing that some Computer Engineering students are definitely more productive on their home machines than on most computers you can give them access to, this somewhat extraordinary adventure shows that some fields—which, until now, were reserved for high-end workstations—can be explored with something as simple as a good Linux box and some relevant software.

UPDATE: 11/29/2006

If you want to see the pictures and code relating ot this article go to this link: www.step.polymtl.ca/~coyote/graphics_tank.html