Based Logs #0 - Prologue

I’m really interested in the field of graphics programming and I want to become a graphics programmer. I’ve made previous attempts at learning graphics working on projects such as Vulkan Model Viewer, WebGL2 Model Viewer, OpenGL Model Viewer, and Lean Renderer. These projects started towards the end of my university degree up until early 2024. The first mistake I made was starting with Vulkan… it is notoriously difficult and I basically just followed a video tutorial without learning much. I decided to swap to OpenGL derivatives and found myself making progress. My latest attempt Lean Renderer was going good until I took a detour to win £10,000 in a game jam.

So what did I realize with all of this trial and error? LearnOpenGL is a crazy good resource and I plan to go through the major sections and implement them. This is basically what I was doing with the Lean Renderer project. I’ll be continuing my progress made in Lean Renderer in my new project Lean Engine. The biggest difference between the two is I’m going to design the latter around using entt. I found that when working on Lean Renderer that implementing new graphics functionality such as different light types proved to be painful without ECS.

I’m going to be writing blogs about features I find interested and concepts I want to commit to memory. A lot of times I will be repeating exactly what I learned within LearnOpenGL but in a form where I can understand it. The first goal of the project will be to cover and implement every single important concept taught in LearnOpenGL. I think afterwards rewriting the project using a modern graphics API makes sense.