I've been working on studying Web GL and I spotted a recent Chrome message when the browser is mis-configured. I guess Chrome developers had a good sense of humour and when this happens a pop-up message saying "Rats! WebGL hit a snag." is displayed just below the address bar on a yellow stripe.

To see how this issue can be overcome, plus an insight into some hidden Chrome settings config, I created this brief YouTube video tutorial Rats! WebGL hit a snag, I hope it helps someone out there who is facing this issue in their browser. 

So, we've all been fiddling with OpenGL in a desktop environment. And some of us have probably already heard of WebGL, but never got a chance to work with it.

This led me to record How to Initialize WebGL in 11 Minutes. After watching this tutorial, you would have your basic blank "3D canvas" box cleared to black background.

Hope this helps someone out getting ready to transition to WebGL.

Greg Sidelnikov of FalloutSoftware.com has applied updates to his OpenGL tutorials. An entirely new article Normal Mapping Tutorial has been added providing several insights on what the pinkish/bluish colors actually represent. The difference between Immediate Mode (glBegin, glEnd) and the modern Vertex Buffer Object technique has been added to the Drawing OpenGL Primitives via VBO tutorial. Better diagrams have been improved in OpenGL Light tutorial. Greg is also planning to start adding GLSL fragment and vertex shader tutorials to the site soon. If this piques your interest you can subscribe to the tutorial newsletter on the site. Greg has been hosting OpenGL tutorials since 2003.

There is a really interesting video from the recent GDC 2013 conference that goes into detail about how Valve and Nvidia ported the Source engine to the Linux platform. The majority of the talk focuses on the port from D3D to OpenGL. There is nothing but glowing praise for OpenGL throughout the talk. Definitely worth checking out!

Mesa, the Open Source OpenGL implementation has released a new major version which includes support for OpenGL 3.1. The release announcement can be found here.

Although Mesa works on multiple platforms, including Windows, it's on open source operating systems like Linux where it is most important. On Linux, Mesa provides hardware accelerated OpenGL when running open-source graphics drivers. This means that if your graphics card is supported, you will get hardware-accelerated OpenGL 3.1 out-of-the-box on operating systems such as Ubuntu and Debian, even when running from a Live CD or bootable USB stick.

Damien wrote in to tell us about his OpenGL tutorial website which focuses on OpenGL 3.3. Apparently this site was referenced during SIGGRAPH and in various books. It's definitely worth taking a look! You can find it here.

As is the tradition at SIGGRAPH, Khronos just announced the OpenGL 4.3 specification alongside its mobile-focused counter-part OpenGL ES 3.0. One of the more interesting announcements is the inclusion of a new royalty-free texture compression extension called ASTC.

As usual you can find the latest specifications on the registry.

The release announcements for the day can be found on the Khronos website.

This is just a heads up to anyone using my 3D math library "kazmath". Kazmath was originally written for Beginning OpenGL Game Programming II but has been continually improved and updated since then. It's now a fairly large library being used by quite a few people. I've recently moved development of kazmath completely from Launchpad over to GitHub. You can find the repository here: https://github.com/Kazade/kazmath

Kazmath is BSD licensed so free to use in both open and closed projects. Feel free to report bugs, and if you improve the library, just send me a pull request on GitHub :)

Open source, and OpenGL powered strategy game 0 A.D has released a new version. Alpha 9 brings a new Roman Republic faction, a new combat system, a new trading system, improved AI and new animations.

If you are a fan of historical RTS's then you definitely should check this out. 0 A.D is free to download for Linux, Mac and Windows from the WildFire Games website

If you are interested in helping out with the project, you can find details on the Get Involved page.

Kevin sent us an email about his site teaching OpenGL ES 2 for Android which looks really cool. If you're an Android developer or plan to be, be sure to have a look!

http://www.learnopengles.com/