Plagiarizing

Yeah, I''d say it''s wrong (sorry). While certain things, though not many, can only be done in a fairly fixed way, the structure of the code, and a lot of the implementation can be changed (and extremely improved upon). To be honest, you really don''t want to copy a lot of the functions from NeHe because a lot of it is not efficient and design leaves much to be desired. Call it using the NeHe code as a base, or whatever you want, but when you do, you can''t really call it your own -- only a program that you modified.

--------------------
Matthew Calabrese
Realtime 3D Orchestra:
Programmer, Composer,
and 3D Artist/Animator
"I can see the music..."

For example in the code to resize an OpenGL scene:

void OpenGL::ResizeGLWindow(GLsizei width,GLsizei height)
{
if (height==0)
{
height = 1;
}

glViewport(0,0,width,height); //set viewport size
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION); //select projection matrix
glLoadIdentity(); //reset matrix
gluPerspective(45.0f,(GLfloat)width/(GLfloat)height,0.1f,100.0f); //aspect ratio
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW); //select modelview matrix
glLoadIdentity(); //reset matrix
}


I was thinking how else could this be written? If I were to write the function without taking a look at his code and get everything from MSDN it would still look pretty much the same.

i have no moral qualms about using somebody elses code if its the only way to get the job done and if i understand how its working. If the code is beyond me for example, using a network class somebody has created, i''ll mention the author in the credits.

Well if you think of it that way then you can't call it your own program when you use WNDCLASSEX and CreateWindowEx, it's Microsoft's.

Sometime there's just no other way to do it.

http://roninmagus.hopto.org

[edited by - Ronin Magus on August 1, 2002 6:45:49 PM]

well actually i think it is bad when you totally keep on foccusing on the way they do it, cause there is plenty to change...

ok so the "main code" (windows setup and so on) might not be so easy to change, but for example, nehe has no real code combining their load level, multitexturing, lightning, shadows, collision detection and waving flags ( and so on and on..)

so there is lots of changes you can make, but consider it this way: the main code of a windows program is not that easy to change...

tho if you give out any kind of exe to others, it would be nice to put nehe.gamedev.net or whatever in your after credits

GreetZ

Over time, you will learn that you can certainly rewrite other''s code to be both better and more to your own style.

For example, Kyo asked how to redo this:

void OpenGL::ResizeGLWindow(GLsizei width,GLsizei height)
{
if (height==0)
{
height = 1;
}

I would do this:
void OpenGL::ResizeGLWindow(const GLsizei width, const GLsizei height)
{
m_width = width;
m_height = (0 == height) ? 1 : height;
}

I have saved the window dimensions as member variables, since this is a class and these parameters are valuable in some other circumstances. I have also make the arguments const since they will not be changed. I have changed the comparison from (height == 0) to (0 == height). This ensures that I don''t accidentally do (height = 0) in my comparison because the code won''t compile if I do that.

Anyways, things such as const correctness, c++ style casting, and other features of more solid coding can generally be implemented into nearly any piece of sample code. In any event, once you are done, most of your code will generally be unique to you.