TBGL is a module for 2D/3D graphics, part of the official installation.

It has been in private development by me for 14 years, with kind Sprite contribution from Michael Hartlef.

I decided to open source the project in order to make it more transparent, allow others to peek behind the curtains and maybe, who knows, maybe even join the development

https://github.com/ThinBASIC/thinBasic_TBGL

I still reserve the right to be the benevolent dictator leading the development to keep some continuity in design. Further collaboration details on gitHub.

I hesitated to make this move for a purely selfish motivation of exposing not-so-nice-14-years-in-the-making code, but - what is a better motivation for improvement than publish it as is and keep making it better publicly?

TBGL would never happen without:
- Eros, who is my enthusiastic mentor and friend for years
- José Roca, who donated the PB community amazing and precise headers
- Bob Zale, may he rest in peace, for creating a practical compiler which simply does what I ask it to do and does not overcomplicate simple things (ya hear me, C string handling?!)
- PowerBASIC community, which, long time before StackOverflow came, always had the answer for my challenges
- without support from my parents, without whom I would not be able to start the programming adventure at the age of 8
- amazing thinBasic community, which always inspired the further development by the incredible creations - be it games, impressive function plots or pure demos, always pleasant to see.

I would also like to thank to Michael Hartlef for the contribution of Sprite system and for his patience with my younger ego during the early cooperation

What next?

Publishing TBGL on GitHub is end of one era, but from module perspective just another milestone on the road to the future.

I would now like to focus on design and code cleanup, and preparing TBGL for the next years to come.

I would like it less OpenGL dependant design wise, to make it easier to change the backend in future for any better standard which will inevitably come. The times when I wanted to have OpenGL tatoo are... gone Yet - still not sure the next big thing is Vulkan, hehe.

From user perspective, the goal will be to provide easy to use tool to play with graphics - even at the cost of less efficiency. I do not like the current trend of "getting back to hardcore" with Vulkan, Metal - in my opinion it removes the fun from graphic coding and makes it more a technical than creative task.



Petr