Matrix formatting

gl-matrix is modeled after the needs of WebGL, which in turn uses matrix conventions set by OpenGL. Specifically, a 4x4 matrix is an array of 16 contiguous floats with the 13th, 14th, and 15th elements representing the X, Y, and Z, translation components.

This may lead to some confusion when referencing OpenGL documentation, however, which represents out all matrices in column-major format. This means that while in code a matrix may be typed out as:

[1, 0, 0, 0,
0, 1, 0, 0,
0, 0, 1, 0,
x, y, z, 0]
Copy

The same matrix in the OpenGL documentation is written as:

1 0 0 x
0 1 0 y
0 0 1 z
0 0 0 0
Copy

Please rest assured, however, that they are the same thing! This is not unique to gl-matrix, either, as OpenGL developers have long been confused by the apparent lack of consistency between the memory layout and the documentation.