I've been wanting to look into OpenGL for a while now and after looking through some of the code at work and realising that all the 3D is done using OpenGL gave me an excuse to delve into it myself. 

So first of all I went about finding what I needed to download and how to create an OpenGL ready project in visual studio. This was probably the hardest part of it all. After looking through various webpages I finally got a working application that rendered a blank OpenGL window. 

After doing all this I found some great tutorials online about getting started with OpenGL, although some of them focused on getting something that looked great really fast but skipped over a lot of the functionality. Anyway I found a great tutorial on Lighthouse3d.com which showed me how to set up a project and also very basic steps as to how OpenGL works and details about each function as they were included. 

Below is a video of what I came out with by the end of the day, it may not be that exciting but gave me chance to look at the general process for a basic OpenGL application. 

After today I noticed that OpenGL uses callback functions throughout which seems a little strange at first. Once I got used to them they were extremely easy to follow and allowed me to concentrate on only the piece of code I was working on. 

After working on both DirectX and OpenGL now I have noticed that things are much more simple in OpenGL although that could just be due to the fact that I have had much more experience programming from when I first took on DirectX.

All in all, today has been a productive day and I can't wait to see what else I can do with OpenGL. 

:)

The project that me and the other new starter (Matt) worked on, has had its first proper release. First of all we had to demonstrate the functionality of the program to the rest of the office, which went really well and we had some great feedback. Everybody seemed to want to get their hands on it as soon as possible. There were also a lot of requests for further improvements and possible developments. 

After doing this we then had to respond to a few bug reports from the rest of the office. After cleaning this first beta test up we version stamped it and released it for official use. We have now been told that this is to be put onto the back burner as no more time will be given to add any extra functionality, so we  have cleaned it up, created the documentation for it and sent it for its first code review. 

Away from that project I have been doing some code reviews myself and some bug fixes. the lead programmer has also told me that I will more than likely be working on COM as one of my first projects for Impact (the main program). I have been looking into COM and it also seems pretty straight forward, a lot of the stuff is pre-generated for you within the IDE to make it less complicated. 

I'm looking forward to working on the COM functionality and can hopefully soon be adding my own ideas to further the progress of the company. 

Peace Out :)