After puzzling some time over the tutorials in Lighthouse3D, I finally learned how to prepare a GLSL shader and use it in an OpenGL render. In the beginning I thought a shader could be used on a particular set of vertices and fragments. However, it turned out that the shader was run every frame on every vertex and fragment you gave OpenGL to use. This meant that if you made a simple fragment shader that coloured the current fragment red, then everything you draw on the screen will be red. It turns out the shader replaces the so-called fixed-functionality in the rendering pipeline, which is basically a little assembly line where all the vertices and colours given to the video card gets processed. So instead of having the workers work their normal routine, a shader tells them what to do instead. To be honest I felt a little disappointed since I could not write something like actionscript would allow me to do, but I guess that is just because it isn’t meant to be actionscript.
Reset
I never seem to be satisfied with any of the sites I made, so I made myself swear that this is the last time I’m going to replace the Labs site. The last one was a bit of a joke anyway. If you ever have a choice, Drupal 6 isn’t exactly a good CMS for building production sites, unless you have got plenty of in-house expertise. When you have to spend a whole day messing around with it to get it to let you post just one blog post, perhaps it just isn’t built to write posts.
So the difference is, yes I have moved down to the WordPress side to avoid the grief that comes with Drupal. I have decided that hacking something that works well is easier that hacking something that is borked. So I have decided that I will hack this. Woot. Now back to coding.