Here’s a book CFP, proposals due right after SIGGRAPH. I have to admit, I was a little skeptical when I heard of this as a book idea. However, OpenGL truly is undergoing a resurgence as of late. Not so much on desktops and laptops, though more games are indeed getting made for Macs. Marc DeLoura has a good article on engines in “Game Developer,” May 2011, noting that 15% of traditional “big game” developers plan on Mac version of their games, vs. a mere 2% in 2009. As it is, most every serious game engine is cross-platform, so OpenGL’s special features (and bugs) are not so vital to engine users. Rather, the handheld market is where OpenGL is the only game in town. So, knowing how to make this API sing is pretty vital if you’re working in that area.

The editors: Patrick Cozzi you probably don’t know (yet), though I did point earlier to a poster for this year’s SIGGRAPH that he coauthored (it’s a clever technique). Among other things, he’s first author on a book that’s not out yet, but will be by SIGGRAPH: 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes (you can download book samples and the code). Christophe Riccio you may have heard of if you work with the OpenGL SDK. He maintains the OpenGL Samples, GLM (math), and GLI (imaging). These guys look like good people for the job: energetic and intelligent. So, here’s the CFP – you can comment on it at their blog. Me, just reading their list of topics of interest, I’ll get a copy even if they get articles on just a very few of these. If $50 (or whatever) saves us a day of going down a wrong path, it’s worth it.

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. Some ideas 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:

Please send proposals to editors@openglinsights.com using this example proposal as a template by August 15th.

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, Editors

www.openglinsights.com