The vertex data you're sending per quad is very minimal. The overhead on those function calls is more significant. glDrawElement calls in particular are fairly expensive.
You're not going to see any performance improvements if your VBO is just a quad and then you call glDrawElements 20000 times a frame. This is not the intended usage pattern of VBOs. Pack all 20000 quads into a single VBO and then you only need to call glDrawElements once a frame.
Do you actually need to use angles? You can construct your rotation matrix out of orthogonal unit vectors.
Get the look vector (facing direction) by normalizing the vector from the object to the target.
Find an up vector. If the target is never going to be directly above (or below) the object...
Then I'm not sure what you can possibly mean when you say "if you want anyone besides yourself to use the programs you make." There's nothing stopping you from building an application with MSVC that other people can use, and there is no reason why it should be noticeably more difficult than with...
OK, here is my submission, "Nucleus Tower":
Each tower has a number of charges, which replenish.
When a target is acquired, a charge will be absorbed into the nucleus.
Once the absorption is complete, a lightning beam will be fired at the target(s).
The lightning beam causes "bursts" of...
I was worried that my idea might have been too similar to yours when I saw the screen shot you posted, but when I looked at the map it was fairly different. Both our towers have charges, but the implementations, attacks and general feel of the towers are different.
A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.
The footage of the July...
The only real problem with the graphics (assuming you are referring to the ASCII) is that it makes it hard to see that's going on and contributes to the steep learning curve. Apart from that, it's not so bad, and it also allows the developer to add features to the game without worrying too much...
The rebuttal is correct. This is irresponsible journalism. All these "Darwin was wrong" articles are saying the same thing: That our understanding of evolution has progressed since Darwin to recognize new mechanisms of inheritance and evolutionary change.
Learning new languages introduces you to new concepts and extends the way you think about old ones. A programmer who is only familiar with one language is like an anthropologist who is only familiar with one culture; you're cheating yourself by restricting your knowledge to one domain.