thinBASIC TBGL website, by Petr Schreiber

thinBASIC TBGL Website by Petr Schreiber
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Welcome!

This website demonstrates various techniques related to 3D graphics, which can be directly applied in form of thinBasic scripts!

What exactly can you find here?

Tutorials, articles, forum and even exclusive downloads!

Ever wanted to get into 3D programming? Don't know how to start? Then please pay a visit to our tutorials section!

Are you old 3D veteran searching for some inspiration? Jump to articles

Lost in the sea of internet, no luck in search for interesting sites? Do not hesitate to visit our manually selected links

Want to ask a question? Problems with site content understanding? Want to see how other people use TBGL? Grab your mouse and make a click at our forum

thinBASIC? TBGL?

thinBASIC is interpreted language originally developed in Italy by Eros Olmi and Roberto Biancchi. The first thinBASIC was released long time ago, in the year 2005. As authors put maximum efforts to make it best interpreted BASIC, it is still under development. Since the beginning of the project more developers joined in, and help to make thinBasic better with each release. You can check out current status on official website, where you can also download the thinBasic.

My contribution to this project consists of creation of "TBGL module", set of commands providing access to the amazing world of 3D graphics. This module is provided with documentation and pack of sample code available in every thinBASIC installation.

Why use TBGL module?

TBGL originally started as OpenGL wrapper. That was in times when thinBASIC had no way to interface with Win32 DLLs, only specific module extensions could serve for adding the new functionality. Once using the dynamic libraries was made possible, the module took new path.

Currently, TBGL represents module, which attempts to make creation of both 2D and 3D hardware accelerated graphics accessible to users with different skill levels. There is code path designed for beginners, there are some advanced abstractions like scene-entity system and it is possible to mix TBGL code with pure OpenGL(now provided via header files) as well.

One of the key points is to make the module reliable and compatible. There is lot of 3D engines currently available, but they often target only the modern hardware. Not so the TBGL - it can be used on both old and new hardware, while the internal implementation adapts automatically to the given hardware platform.

There is lot of sample code available, and the workflow is made more comfortable by providing free tools like exporters for 3D modelers, font generator and much more.

Latest news...

05.05.2013 - easy to use Drag&Drop support added to TBGL in new ThinBASIC beta, get it here.

12.04.2013 - user of TBGL prepared complete 3D editor using this module. Have a look!

07.04.2013 - custom crisp anisotropy filtering added to TBGL

* List of the latest news is reduced to items from this year to prevent page being kilometers long, as the website is up since 2005