A comprehensive title targeted at experienced 32-bit Delphi programmers and developers in the use of the industry graphics standard library, OpenGL, which has become a standard for programming in the animation and computer game industries.

The Delphi Developer's Guide to OpenGL gives an outline of OpenGL--once a proprietary graphics library that used to reside only on expensive workstations--and explains its capabilities, including how to use it inside Borland's popular programming language, Delphi.

The book begins with a tour of creating a Delphi project that can utilize OpenGL. Over the first five chapters, the book demonstrates how 3D graphics work using popular computer graphics nomenclature as well as instructions for drawing OpenGL objects in perspective within a Delphi window, and the implementation of the three different types of OpenGL lighting (ambient, specular, and diffuse) upon those objects.

While the book provides great coverage on some of OpenGL's effects (fog, transparency, and mapping textures to surfaces), the most important chapter is "Picking," which discusses how to detect a user's interaction with OpenGL objects (i.e., detecting a user's selection and movement of an onscreen object).