OpenGL Examples in D and a birth of a New Initiative

[Andrej Mitrovic via Digitalmars-d-announce]

I am starting an initiative for everyone interested in D game
development by creating the github organization d-gamedev-team[1].

The first project hosted here is the the freshly created
opengl-tutorials[2] project. This is a long-term project that aims to
collect as many modern OpenGL examples ported to D or even provide new
examples created from scratch in D. All the examples should be easy to
build, provided you have a fresh D compiler and a recent version of
the dub[3] dependency manager / builder tool.

Currently the project contains an almost-complete port of the samples
contained on the website opengl-tutorial.org[4] - which cover OpenGL
v3.3x and were created by Sam Hocevar. The D examples are not straight
ports, they have been D-ified and may contain more features than their
original counterparts. They also use 3rd-party D OpenGL wrappers to
avoid a lot of scaffolding work typical of OpenGL applications.

Thanks to dub[3] you won't have to manually install the D
dependencies. However you may have to install some C/C++ 3rd-party
library dependencies, such as GLFW, SDL2, SDL2 Image, and potentially
other libraries depending on the ones the samples require. The
dependencies are documented in the project's readme[5].

Additional OpenGL example ports are planned and some are already in
progress but have not yet been pushed upstream. See the
opengl-tutorials[2] github repo for a list of ports which are in
progress and a list of desired ports.

If you wish to contribute with your own ports or with brand new D
OpenGL examples don't hesitate to make a pull request. I want the
d-gamedev-team organization to gradually grow and have it host as many
useful projects, whether it be libraries, tools, tutorials, tips &
tricks, assets, or anything else related to D game development.

I am strongly interested in game development in D, and although I'm at
a starting stage I'm very much committed to working on this project to
the best of my abilities. Hopefully in a few years we'll see some
major titles made entirely in D. But before that can happen we have to
make a collective push to bring D to a higher stage where it's
acceptable and viable to game developers, whether it be through
language support (@nogc/allocators) or library and tooling support.

We'll see where this goes, but I'm very excited for the future! Cheers. :o)

[1] : https://github.com/d-gamedev-team
[2] : https://github.com/d-gamedev-team/opengl-tutorials
[3] : http://code.dlang.org/download
[4] : http://opengl-tutorial.org/
[5] : https://github.com/d-gamedev-team/opengl-tutorials/tree/master/ports/opengl-tutorial.org