10/04/02: We Now Interrupt you from Your Regularly Scheduled Tone-Deaf Warbling for a Special Whiplashing Tangent

Heh.  Sorry about that--I'm feeling a little punchy. =) Anyway, As you can guess, I took a wild detour that really doesn't have anything to do with Opengl.

So I was thinking on Wednesday that it might be a good idea to set up a way to take screengrabs of my program as it ran because eventually I'd have to chart my progress on this website, and the only way to do that effectively was to take pictures to make into animated gifs.  It started out with me aimlessly wandering around NeHe, looking for an easy way to take pictures on OpenGL.  Then I enlisted the help of Joey Turner (actually, he looked over and offered his help) and we ended up connecting the program I was trying to get screen captures of (it was for another class, so sue me!) to another C++ program using SDL, or Simple DirectMedia Layer. For a while (like, an hour) we fussed around with SDL_SaveBMP, but it just would not cooperate. Finally we gave up and used a function we found on the web: Screenshot, which takes a screengrab as a *.tga file.  It doesn't even seem like it needs SDL...maybe I'll figure out if I can move it back to opengl someday.  Anyway, I was certain that that was going to be the hardest part, but converting the tga's to gif's and then getting whirlgif to make an animated gif out of all of them turned out to be just as time-consuming.  Saul Dorfman ended up giving me a crash course in Perl, and I'm still gonna have to ask him later how whirlgif is supposed to work because I can't get it to work now.  Blargh.

But for now I'm gonna move back OpenGL tutorials.  While I was scanning through NeHe looking for a way to do screengrabs, I saw something about playing avi file in OpenGl, which I know I'll use later, but I want to get through textures and lighting first, which NeHe also has. =) Anyway, have a nice weekend, y'all!