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jones_supa writes "A bit surprisingly, Valve Software has uploaded their Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer onto GitHub as open source. It is provided as-is and with no support, under the MIT license allowing you to do pretty much anything with it. Taken directly from the DOTA2 source tree, the translation layer supports limited subset of D3D 9.0c, bytecode-level HLSL to GLSL translator, and some SM3 support. It will require some tinkering to get it to compile, and there is some hardcoded Source-specific stuff included. The project might bring some value to developers who are planning to port their product from Windows to Linux."

jones_supa writes "OpenGL debugging has always lagged behind DirectX, mainly because of the excellent DX graphics debugging tools shipping with Visual Studio and GL being left with APITrace. Valve's Linux initiatives are making game companies to think about OpenGL, and the video game company wants to create a good open source OpenGL debugger to improve the ecosystem. AMD and Nvidia have already expressed interest in helping them out. Valve has been developing VOGL mostly on Ubuntu-based distributions under Qt Creator. The software currently supports tracing OpenGL 1.0 through 3.3 (core and compatibility), and is expected to eventually support OpenGL 4.x. Many more details on VOGL can be found at Valve's Rich Geldreich's blog." This looks much nicer than BuGLe. Valve is using Mercurial for version control and they plan to throw it up on bitbucket under an unspecified open source license soon. It works with clang and gcc, but debugging with gcc is currently very slow (hopefully something that can be fixed once the source is available and the gcc hackers can see what's going on). The tracer's internal binary log format can be converted into JSON for use with other tools as well.

An anonymous reader writes "Mesa and its open-source Intel graphics driver now are in compliance with the OpenGL 3.2 specification (PDF). It took four years for Mesa to get up to GL 3.2 / GLSL 1.50 compliance, and support for the other Mesa drivers isn't too far behind, but they're still years behind in supporting OpenGL 4. Supporting a major new OpenGL API has resulted in Mesa 10.0 being called the next release. It has many other features, like performance improvements and new Gallium3D features. OpenGL 3.3 support might also be completed prior to the Mesa 10.0 release in November."

Zmee writes "I am looking to build a 2D application for personal use and I will need to use a canvas to paint custom objects. I am trying to determine what foundation to use and have not located a good side-by-side comparison of the various flavors. For reference, I need the final application to work in Windows; Linux is preferred, but not required. I have looked at WPF, Qt, OpenGL, Tcl/Tk, Java's AWT, and others. I have little preference as to the language itself, but each of the tutorials appear to require significant time investment. As such, I am looking to see what the community uses and what seems to work for people prior to making that investment."

asgard4 writes "OpenGL SuperBible in its fifth edition is almost a complete rewrite. The authors threw out the discussion of old-style, fixed-function programming and replaced it with an introduction to OpenGL that is exclusively focused on using shaders from the very beginning. All the things that got deprecated with the advent of OpenGL 3 got removed, making it a more relevant and up-to-date book than the previous editions. The OpenGL SuperBible still strives to be the 'world's best introduction to OpenGL' according to the authors. Let's see if it can keep that promise." Read on for the rest of Martin's review. OpenGL SuperBible (Fifth Edition) author Richard S. Wright, Jr., Nicholas Haemel, Graham Sellers, Benjamin Lipchak pages 969 publisher Addison-Wesley Publishing http://www.awl.com rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0-32-171261-7 summary : Quite possibly the best introduction to OpenGL 3.3 programming that focuses exclusively on graphics programming using shaders With the removal of the fixed-function pipeline, the OpenGL SuperBible is no longer quite the heavy-weight it used to be. It shrunk from more than 1200 to about 970 pages, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The book starts out with a basic introduction to 3D graphics, coordinate systems, and some basic math concepts, followed by short rundown of the history of OpenGL and a first little example program that renders a triangle. The authors even provide instructions on how to setup the C/C++ projects to build the example on Windows and MacOS. The writing is to the point but still verbose enough to easily follow the text. The authors analyze the example program in detail making it easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code. Overall, I really like the writing style and the flow of the book.

The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functionality intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, alpha blending, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to move objects and the camera. Eventually, basic texture mapping is introduced with most of the basic things you need to know about the topic. In particular, specifying textures coordinates, sampling textures in the fragment shader, the various filtering modes (even anisotropic filtering), and texture compression are discussed. In a later chapter the authors do another deep dive into the topic of textures, in particular rectangle textures, cube maps, multitexturing, point sprites, and using texture arrays

Until this point the authors used haven't really talked much about shader programming yet. Most of the examples use simple pre-made shaders that don't really do much. This changes with chapter six titled "Nonstock Shaders" where we get a first glimpse of how to write our own shaders in GLSL, the OpenGL Shading Language. In particular, a fragment shader that uses a simple lighting model to light objects is developed.

After these introductory chapters presenting the basics of OpenGL programming, the next part of the book focuses on more advanced topics, beginning with buffer objects and how to use them to make your OpenGL programs run much more efficiently on modern hardware. Some of the examples presented in this part of the book include using render-to-texture to do reflections, tone mapping, and bloom. This part of the book closes with two fairly long chapters on advanced usage of the shader pipeline, in particular the transform feedback and the geometry shader stages. There is also some discussion on more advanced effects achievable with fragment shaders, in particular applying filters to images, such as a Gaussian blur or a Sobel filter. Finally, rendering geometry efficiently with vertex buffer objects and rendering many objects via geometry instancing is presented.

The final part of the book consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.

The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 24 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage.

If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details (or even more advanced topics). It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. The decision to completely drop any discussion of the fixed-function pipeline turned out to be an excellent choice. Finally there is a book that no longer wastes the reader's time with the parts of OpenGL that nobody who does serious graphics development uses and instead presents up-to-date information on how to do 3D graphics on modern graphics hardware.

All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible in its fifth edition succeeds very well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.

The review author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL SuperBible (Fifth Edition) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

tbcpp writes "The Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 4.0 specification. Among the new features: two new shader stages that enable the GPU to offload geometry tessellation from the CPU; per-sample fragment shaders and programmable fragment shader input positions; drawing of data generated by OpenGL, or external APIs such as OpenCL, without CPU intervention; shader subroutines for significantly increased programming flexibility; 64-bit, double-precision, floating-point shader operations and inputs/outputs for increased rendering accuracy and quality. Khronos has also released an OpenGL 3.3 specification, together with a set of ARB extensions, to enable as much OpenGL 4.0 functionality as possible on previous-generation GPU hardware."

ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"

ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"

ikol writes "After over a year of delays, the OpenGL ARB (part of the Khronos industry group) today released the long-awaited spec for OpenGL 3.0 as part of the SIGGRAPH 2008 proceedings. Unfortunately it turns out not to be the major rewrite that was promised to developers. The developer community is generally furious, with many game developers intending to jump ship to DX10. Is this the end of cross-platform 3d on the cutting edge?"

Martin Ecker writes "The OpenGL SuperBible, in its vastly expanded fourth edition, is the latest addition to the Addison-Wesley Professional OpenGL series. According to the authors it 'strives to provide the world's best introduction to not only OpenGL, but 3D graphics programming in general.' A tough goal to achieve." Read the rest of Martin's review to see if the book keeps its promise. OpenGL SuperBible (Fourth Edition) author Richard S. Wright, Jr., Benjamin Lipchak, Nicholas Haemel pages 1205 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 9/10 reviewer Martin Ecker ISBN 0321498828 summary A solid introduction to OpenGL programming that focuses on both the old-style fixed-function pipeline and new-style shaders.

The OpenGL SuperBible, is split into three parts, appropriately called the old testament, the new testament, and the apocrypha. Arguably, appendix C, an OpenGL API reference with more than 350 pages, could be considered a fourth part even though it isn't listed as such in the table of contents.

The old testament provides an introduction to both OpenGL programming with the fixed-function pipeline and to the basics of 3D graphics programming. The new testament then moves on to describe how shaders, small programs that run on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), allow us to use the programmable features of today's powerful graphics cards. It also contains information on recent advancements of the OpenGL API, such as floating-point textures, pixel buffer objects and framebuffer objects. The apocrypha closes the book with a discussion of how to interface OpenGL with the underlying operating system.

The first part of the book — the old testament — consists of 14 chapters with around 500 pages total. The first chapter gives a general overview of 3D graphics and the various effects that the remaining chapters in this part of the book are going to show how to implement with OpenGL. The writing style is very casual and easy to follow. Especially in these first chapters, the book is very light on mathematics, but does explain some of the basics, such as coordinate systems, some simple vector algebra, and matrices. The second chapter introduces OpenGL and immediately presents a few simple sample programs to wet the reader's appetite. The programs are analyzed in detail with explanations to nearly all lines of code. It should be easy for a beginner to follow and understand the code.

The next few chapters gradually introduce more and more OpenGL API functions intermixed with new 3D graphics concepts, such as rendering points, lines, and polygons in various ways, how to use geometric transformations and projections, and how to use the fixed-function pipeline to render lit objects with simple projective shadows. Eventually, texture mapping is introduced with pretty much everything you need to know about the topic. In particular, multitexturing, the various filtering modes — even anisotropic filtering, texture compression, and using textures with point sprites are discussed. The book continues with an overview of curves and surfaces as supported by the OpenGL Utility library (GLU, for short). The book dates itself a bit here, since this is a software-only, and thus fairly low-performance feature that is rarely ever used in professional software. The same applies to the discussion of feedback and selection, which are not implemented on current graphics hardware and therefore not widely used. After this short excursion down the OpenGL memory lane the book moves on to the fairly recent addition of occlusion queries. Occlusion queries are used to detect complex, occluded objects in the rendered scene, so that they need not be rendered. Most modern-day graphics software that renders dense scenes with a lot of overdraw, such as video games, uses this feature. The old testament closes with a chapter on depth textures, which are prominently applied to render real-time shadow effects.

After laying a solid foundation for 3D graphics programming with OpenGL in the first part, the second part of the book — the new testament — deals with the new era of graphics programming that started a few years ago when the first programmable graphics card came into the market. This part consists of 4 chapters with about 100 pages. The first chapter provides an overview of the programmable pipeline and explains which features of the fixed-function were replaced by shaders. This introduction is followed by a sample program that gives a first glimpse of GLSL, the OpenGL shading language, in which shaders are written. The next chapter is all about vertex shaders and how to implement simple lighting models, fog, and vertex transformations using them. The third chapter is about fragment shading with some interesting post-processing and procedural texture mapping shaders. The final chapter of this part of the book discusses advanced buffers, such as floating-point textures and color buffers, and pixel buffer and framebuffer objects — all recent additions to OpenGL that allow to achieve various effects, such as rendering directly to a texture or creating vertex data on the GPU.

The final part of the book — the apocrypha — consists of 4 chapters explaining how to integrate OpenGL with the underlying operating system, in particular with Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux plus various other Unix flavors. The last chapter of this part of the book is about OpenGL ES, which is a version of OpenGL designed to be used especially on embedded system devices, in particular mobile phones and PDAs, to render real-time, interactive 3D graphics.

The book has a lot of images and diagrams throughout, though unfortunately not all of them are in color. There are however 32 color plates of the most interesting images in the middle of the book. The complete source code of the book, and even precompiled binaries for Windows and Mac OS X, can be downloaded from the book's webpage.

If you are new to both 3D graphics programming and OpenGL with a bit of C/C++ programming experience and you are eager to learn how to develop interactive programs with OpenGL, then this book is exactly right for you. The book is written in an easy to understand style without skimming the details. It is the most comprehensive introduction to OpenGL that doesn't require a lot of previous knowledge I have seen to date. If you already have experience with another graphics API or are well-versed in 3D graphics in general, but want to familiarize yourself with OpenGL, you might also want to consider the OpenGL Programming Guide, also known as the Red Book.

All in all, the OpenGL SuperBible succeeds fairly well in keeping its promise to be the best introduction to OpenGL and 3D graphics programming. Even after you're done working your way through the main parts of the book you will always come back to the handy OpenGL API reference in the appendix of the book.

I have been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and work as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios in sunny California.

You can purchase OpenGL SuperBible Fourth Edition from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

srw writes "OpenGL is the industry choice for cross platform, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and it is also the only way you can get fast 3D graphics on your Linux desktop. It now seems Windows Vista implements OpenGL via Direct3D, seriously degrading its performance and attractiveness to developers." From the article: "In practice this means for OpenGL under Aeroglass: OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%, OpenGL on Windows will be fixed at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4, No extensions will be possible to expose future hardware innovations. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision."

srw writes "OpenGL is the industry choice for cross platform, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and it is also the only way you can get fast 3D graphics on your Linux desktop. It now seems Windows Vista implements OpenGL via Direct3D, seriously degrading its performance and attractiveness to developers." From the article: "In practice this means for OpenGL under Aeroglass: OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%, OpenGL on Windows will be fixed at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4, No extensions will be possible to expose future hardware innovations. It would be technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within the full Aeroglass experience without compromising the stability or the security of the operating system. Layering OpenGL over Direct3D is a policy more than a technical decision."

berny@work writes "OpenGL has finally released version 2.0. The benefits include Programable Shaders, in particular: Shader Objects, Shader Programs, OpenGL Shading Language and changes to the Shader API. If you are interested take a look at the tutorials and the case studies that are linked to from the OpenGL site."

berny@work writes "OpenGL has finally released version 2.0. The benefits include Programable Shaders, in particular: Shader Objects, Shader Programs, OpenGL Shading Language and changes to the Shader API. If you are interested take a look at the tutorials and the case studies that are linked to from the OpenGL site."

juan_buhler writes "SIGGRAPH 2004 started Sunday in the Los Angeles Convention Center. I am chairing the Sketches program for 2005, and along with Nishant Kothary, who is chairing the Web program in 2005, Danah Boyd and others, we are running a pilot with a blog and a wiki. Check them out. The blog has almost real time posting of what's going on at SIGGRAPH, so it's a great way to see it if you couldn't make it this year" Read on for a few more notes from Siggraph.

First, steveha writes "As noted on LWN, SGI has announced the OpenGL 2.0 specification, which includes support for programmable shaders. How long will it be before we get native Linux applications using this?"

protohiro1 writes "I just saw this HDR display and it blew me away, it was like looking at a slide on a light table. Is this the future of display tech?"

abacsalmasi wrote about a "nifty little thing called Echo. I, along with two other chaps, have started a company called Stable Research Inc. and we'll be showing our Echo prototype at the Siggraph show. It is essentially live DVD recordings at concert venues where we can have burned DVDs of the concert they just saw, ready minutes after the show for people to pick up on their way out. The cool thing about it is the ability to switch camera angles on the fly, without any lag or stuttering, plus we include another composite ganged feed so you can watch all the cameras simultaneously. A demo will be showing at The Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media booth so stop by and check it out. Web Demo coming soon."

Screaming Lunatic writes "The OpenGL2 working group has approved the draft version of The OpenGL Shading Language (glslang). It looks like OpenGL2.0 is getting there."

Screaming Lunatic writes "The OpenGL2 working group has approved the draft version of The OpenGL Shading Language (glslang). It looks like OpenGL2.0 is getting there."

Visigothe writes "Siggraph has made available the Apple Quartz Extreme Demonstration PDF. The PDF has an overview of some interesting Quartz Extreme features, including the OpenGL calls that are made, as well as the new OpenGL extensions that Apple created for their upcoming Jaguar release. This is going to be a very interesting window system indeed!"

Sesse writes: "SGI announced yesterday that the OpenGL 1.4 specification was agreed upon by the ARB. Trying to minimize the gap between D3D8 and OpenGL, the standard adds a lot of functionality already common (being exposed as extensions in many drivers today), but more importantly brings a standard specification for vertex shaders. This should be good news for anybody doing cross-platform eyecandy :-)" This announcement is related to, but broader than, the one mentioned earlier about bringing OpenGL to mobile devices.

An anonymous reader writes "Minutes of the latest OpenGL ARB meeting reveal that Microsoft is claiming IP over the vertex and fragment extensions, both critical for exposing the capabilities of modern graphics hardware. The minutes also include an update on the progress of OpenGL 2.0." The question is, what does this mean for Linux -- how will Microsoft exercise their "rights"?

An anonymous reader writes "Minutes of the latest OpenGL ARB meeting reveal that Microsoft is claiming IP over the vertex and fragment extensions, both critical for exposing the capabilities of modern graphics hardware. The minutes also include an update on the progress of OpenGL 2.0." The question is, what does this mean for Linux -- how will Microsoft exercise their "rights"?

kabir writes "OpenGL.org has a link to a fun article over at the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory. It seems an OpenGL-based GUI has been developed to enable the operation of multiple complex field robots by a single operator. The interaction mechanism was inspired by interface techniques refined in the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre of video games. Fifty years from now I expect all wars to be fought by giant robots controlled by teenagers."

OpenGL.org webmaster writes: "Now that the OpenGL 2.0 white papers are in review, we'd like to indicate to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board who is considering taking advantage of these developments. If your hardware or software company is in favor of the direction and ideas behind OpenGL 2.0, please take a few seconds to indicate your support by adding your company name and comments to this survey list."

OpenGL.org webmaster writes: "Now that the OpenGL 2.0 white papers are in review, we'd like to indicate to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board who is considering taking advantage of these developments. If your hardware or software company is in favor of the direction and ideas behind OpenGL 2.0, please take a few seconds to indicate your support by adding your company name and comments to this survey list."

JigSaw writes "The OpenGL Architecture Review Board announced the new OpenGL 1.3 specification (1.8 MB pdf). In OpenGL 1.3, several additional features and functions have been ratified and brought into the API's core functionality. New features include Cube map texturing, multisampling, new texture modes that provide more powerful ways of applying textures to rendered objects, compressed texture framework etc. Let's all hope that GL can catch up with Direct3D now, as with the latest DirectX8, Direct3D has done some big steps towards feature-set, speed and even non-bloatiness when it comes to coding for it, while OpenGL 1.2 was released more than 2 years ago and it did not offer as much."

CitizenC writes: "The OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) today announced the new OpenGL 1.3 specification. OpenGL.org will host this specification shortly. In OpenGL 1.3, several additional features and functions have been ratified and brought into the API's core functionality. You can read more about the release in general in this Yahoo news story, or go straight to OpenGL.org to view the specs yourself."

RickMuller asks: "I'm interested in molecular graphics, a field entirely dominated by OpenGL. I would love to see something more web-friendly come along. I've worked with VRML and Java3D, and have been very puzzled why these technologies didn't become ubiquitous. Now there are new 3D efforts by Adobe and Macromedia (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!). The press is heralding this as the 3D web revolution. Why should these technologies succeed when VRML or Java3D failed?"

Slashback items tonight on India's satellite launch, a bi-coastal EFF-organized protest (yes, will involve leaving your cubicle, basement, silo, remote farm, etc.), Apple not falling far from the tree, and the death of Indrema. Read on below :)

Show your truuuuueee colors ... h0mee writes: "Howdy! This has already been posted on slashdot, but we still need more volunteers showing up at the protests. This protest is being organized by the EFF against federally mandated censorware in schools and libraries. The protests are occuring on this friday in the SF Bay Area and the NYC areas. I'd like to remind slashdot readers on the completely cynical side that even small groups of protestors showing up will have big impacts, as the FCC will be caught completely off guard by hordes of angry geeks showing up- this protest can make a difference! Please check out the EFF's protest page on this for more info for coordination and ridesharing, or this rant on craigslist for SF bay locals. Show your geek pride, and help us distribute Clue to the FCC!"

Hey, stop looking at me! And no feeling, either! In response to CmdrTaco's recent post about Apple moving yet again to block the makers of Apple-reminscent themes, WillAdams writes:h "The response, and the original letter are up at http://www.macthemes.org.

They'd like a lawyer..."

Sounds fair. Soon lawyers defending Open Source will take over as the heros of the software world. "Didn't there used to be programmers, too, dad?"

Up in the air, Junior Birdman w00ly_mammoth writes: "After an aborted attempt, India has launched a satellite rocket. Signals from it were picked up in Canada. The Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, or GSLV-D1, is capable of giving the nation communication and military capabilities, according to western analysts. The US has been concerned about this development for a while. This could also rattle the aerospace industry, since it marks an entry into the lucrative satellite launch market."

(Invent your own aphorism involving ashes, phoenixes and plant life.) impaler writes: "Games Mania has a story with three people's views on the death of indrema. They interview Mark Collins (author of Linux Game Programming), Clinton Ebadi (me / that lamer that does nothing useful), and Steve Baker (of TuxKart fame). All three offer different opinions on why indrema went down."

Speaking of games, ryants writes: "OpenGL.org is reporting that NVidia's GeForce3 meets or beats the functionality available in DX8 via OpenGL extensions. This bodes well for Linux gaming." Take your grains of salt, head out back, and play some TuxKart;)

bwoodring writes "Yahoo! Business News is reporting that 3dfx has been admitted to the OpenGL Architectural Review Board. This could be an indication that 3dfx plans to retire their proprietary 3D API Glide soon in favor of the more ubiquitous (and Linux friendly) OpenGL."

Paranoid Diatribe asks: "I'm a Unix admin for a scientific computing environment at a large public university. In the past few weeks, I've had the (dis)pleasure of dealing with several vendors to get their applications re-licensed to run on various machines. These are vendors of scientific applications like MOLGEN, apps from MSI, and S-PLUS. There are many others. The majority use the most evil of license managers, Flex-LM. I spend more time messing with Flex, license key files, and calling the damned vendors than I do actually administering the boxes they run on. As such, I am becoming very disenchanted with these commercial vendors. Is there a compilation of alternative scientific computing apps (GPL, BSD, or other open license would be preferable) and how they match up to their commercial counterparts? I'm aware of Freshmeat.net and a small list at the OpenGL site (though many of these are commercial as well), but I was wondering if there was a better list of such apps."

Straker Skunk writes, "Loki, in conjunction with Creative Labs, has announced OpenAL, an LGPL'ed audio library for 3D sound generation. It's aimed for use in games as a cross-platform, nonproprietary means of accessing the 3D sound features on many newer sound cards. What's especially cool about it is that the API is designed with the same style, philosophy, and polish as OpenGL. Given enough time, it might very well become just as popular. " I've always been a fan of Loki and it's great to see them supporting the community - someone also sent an interview with Michael Vance, one of the developers behind OpenAL, who talks about the development of OpenAL and how it compares to other sound offerings.

This week's interview guest is Brian Paul. He's one of those quiet "background" Open Source deveoplers you hardly ever hear about. But if you're a gamer, game author or have had other reasons to deal with OpenGL in Linux or free software development, you've probably used Mesa, which has been Brian's "baby" since the project started in 1993. One question per post, please. We'll send the top 10 - 15 quetsions to Brian Tuesday and post his answers Friday.

tomaasz@iol.cz writes "there is now full opengl on the newton PDA! cool. will q3a work on that thing? no? so what is it good for? aaah, I see, screensavers... read all about it on opengl.org"