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Technical reason.

Developers just not targetting it is not it. It isn't like multimedia libraries don't exist for many platforms including Linux.

It's FUD spreading people like you who give OSS projects bad press. Go stand in the corner and think of what you did.

Tom

SGI put out some increadibly cool technologies:

OpenGL - a very important 3D API

The Standard Template Library

VRML which gave rise to X3D Open Inventor which is a C++ wrapper around OpenGL.

Pretty purple boxen that were great in their day.

It seems that these came out years before the average user could really leverage them - years before anyone (including SGI it seems) knew what to do with them.

It seems a shame that such a brilliant company could have such a hard time making money. They made the world a better place though, IMHO.

The binary opposite of the color 'black' is 'not black'.

I dunno bud, if your defining black as something other than the opposite of white, then your doing something bad. Even if you consider that you might have other slots available in the bit slice you are considering, you really should make them Don't Cares for sanity.

!white = !00000000 00000000 00000000 = 11111111 11111111 11111111 = black.If you're having to think about things some other way, something is wrong. Or you're a mathematician :P

Anyway to stay on topic, here's my particular path so far in the quest for coding:

Walk through this online course:
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/

Now write at least 3 different (as in technique) programs that crash your computer before you continue. You can boot into Windows if you're feeling lazy. :)

Buy C++ Primer Plus, and go as far as you can till you're bored out of your mind and itching to code something real. (Optional)

Get this library, then go thru tutorials. Then frolick and play:
http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/glut.htm l

Make a xxeyes program. Like xeyes but looks away from your mouse. (That way you can get outside crosseyes dammit! :D)

Make a program that scrambles an image into 10x10 blocks.

Reimplement pong.

Make a program to play wav files. Brownie points if you can get a spectrum analyzer or some other representation working with GLUT. (Read up on fast Fourier transforms, which is what you'll be using. Don't use a library for it, thats cheating :) )

Check out wxWidgets. Walk through the tutorials.

Make your own text editor.

Make a basic sound player app with a spectrum analyzer. Make it echo/reverb output. (Read up on FIR Filters)


I'm sure I've forgotten things...oh well. Just tackle whatever sounds fun.

Prior to graduating high school (2002), I had never used anything except Microsoft Windows. Now, I use Linux almost exclusively. I say almost only because I play games occasionally and I have one class that requires(!) me to use Windows. A major concern of mine is that game developers will have to stop using OpenGL, making it far more difficult to release games on multiple platforms, reducing the chance of there ever being a Linux gaming market. Why? Because Microsoft is planning to reduce the performance of OpenGL in Windows Vista:

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/cgi_direct ory/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000001

If you do not want Microsoft's strangle-hold to continue, you should be concerned about this.

Its good to see a convert over to the OpenGL side :)

for a little more active disscussion you can read about it this is from the www.opengl.org forums.
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/cgi_direct ory/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000001

It looks like the main issue at present is that to utilise openGL 2 Vista will turn off the Areoglass automaticaly, "degrading" the user experience. Which is at worst a major turn off for prtential buyers and developers, at best, likely to be rather ugly.

From having a little touchup read of the openGL 2.0 Spec introduction to reaquaint myself
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/version2 .0/glspec20.pdf

This is rather similar to the Java VM mess they stepped in, and i hope it gets resolved without that amount of hassle, Java was strong enough to deal with it, Im not to sure how well OpenGL (at least in the minds of developers and customers) on the windows platform will survive such a mess.

Its good to see a convert over to the OpenGL side :)

for a little more active disscussion you can read about it this is from the www.opengl.org forums.
http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/cgi_direct ory/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000001

It looks like the main issue at present is that to utilise openGL 2 Vista will turn off the Areoglass automaticaly, "degrading" the user experience. Which is at worst a major turn off for prtential buyers and developers, at best, likely to be rather ugly.

From having a little touchup read of the openGL 2.0 Spec introduction to reaquaint myself
http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/version2 .0/glspec20.pdf

This is rather similar to the Java VM mess they stepped in, and i hope it gets resolved without that amount of hassle, Java was strong enough to deal with it, Im not to sure how well OpenGL (at least in the minds of developers and customers) on the windows platform will survive such a mess.

Too bad OpenGL is getting crippled in Windows Vista. By the time Vist is in full swng, OpelGL on windows can't possibly be as popular if it's performance is drained by the layering.

That one is an old version. Get Edition 4 here instead:

http://opengl.org/documentation/red_book_1.0/

Don't know if the fifth is online yet.

You can get this book in PDF or HTML for free from here. Obviously it's as up to date as this edition but probably good enough for most beginners.

The reason they call it the red book is to distinguish it from the blue book, which is the OpenGL reference manual.

http://www.opengl.org/documentation/blue_book_1.0/

or the fact that Windows Vista isn't going to support a full OpenGL ICD driver and will apparently run OpenGL under a Virtual Machine resulting in 50% performance under Vista?

http://www.opengl.org/

Submitted almost a week ago, and didn't show up on slashdot whatsoever...no, this isn't important or a conscious decision by microsoft, no...they wouldn't do that now would they...

It is visually identical to the xlib version and it benchmarks on average 100:1 faster, sometimes 400:1 faster than xlib

Because it is only visually identical on casual inspection - it is not and cannot be guaranteed visually identical across all OpenGL drivers, at least not without significant specification over and above the OpenGL spec!

There are a lot of computer graphics novices working on X desktop eye candy at the moment who apparently don't know OpenGL well enough to know this. Endless teenage eyecandy fanboys fall into the OpenGL-solves-all trap. They eventually grow out of it. I have a horrible feeling some of the Glitz developers don't even know the basic fact below about opengl (*) (Not some deep mystery or anything, it's well-documented on http://opengl.org/ etc):

OpenGL SIMPLY DOES NOT SPECIFY guaranteed pixel-accurate and color-accurate reproduction across opengl implementations. Within any one opengl implementation, certain things have to produce the same results each time (so called "invariants"), but they can produce different results in different opengl drivers - i.e. nvidia, ati, or matrox cards are all permitted to be fully OpenGL-compliant yet may each render the same input data subtly (or not so subtly) differently.

(Actually, even now, with most cards being targeted at gamer-idiots, some "opengl" drivers may well fail to maintain even the defined intra-implementation invariants as some of them have performance implications.)

Thus, OpenGL is just not suitable for a high-end 2D API without further specification of those areas that OpenGL is totally up-front about being silent on!

(* or they might know, but not care, because the invariants mentioned will mean rendered results should look consistent on any one desktop, so in the thoroughly-non-professional casual-desktop-user happy-if-windows-wobble-like-jelly market it doesn't matter too much. However: graphics professionals (like me!) also care that they look consistent across multiple desktops - perhaps not necessarily those of casual desktop users, who typically don't even know that it might be a good idea to tweak a PC's abysmal default gamma curve - but the desktops of other graphics pros with whom we might be collaborating. So right now, that means "graphics pros must use a mac" - linux simply can't compete in the area. This isn't "ooh arty boys sleep with men and use froo-froo macs", this is "linux is seriously technically deficient compared to mac in this area (area of pro 2D graphics, not sleeping with men, I have no idea how linux and mac compare there, but actually since linux is popular in robotics, it's probably ahead... but I digress...)").

Well I hope OS X users realize opengl is a must for their games...

I'd call this FUD but looks like OpenGL people took it serious, pasting from forum, admins post:

Microsoft's current plan for OpenGL on Windows Vista is to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in order to use OpenGL with a composited desktop to obtain the Aeroglass experience. If an OpenGL ICD is run - the desktop compositor will switch off - significantly degrading the user experience.

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.

What can you do?
Write to your preferred ISV, hardware developer or OEM and tell them to bring this up with Microsoft (e.g. 3Dlabs, ATI, Intel, Matrox, NVIDIA, HP, Dell)
Bring this issue up on other developer and tech-related web sites. If you have a personal blog or podcast, talk about the issue there. Windows Vista might end up being a great product, but not if OpenGL is crippled
Post your comments to this message board (please no Microsoft bashing - Just make it clear that Windows needs to stay a great platform for the OpenGL API and offer any suggestions)

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/cgi_direct ory/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=12;t=000001

Not exactly, taken from here

In practice this means for OpenGL under Aeroglass:

        * OpenGL performance will be significantly reduced - perhaps as much as 50%
        * OpenGL on Windows will be stuck at a vanilla version of OpenGL 1.4
        * No extensions will be possible to expose future hardware innovations

There are no blocking technical issues to implementing an OpenGL ICD with the full Aeroglass experience on Windows Vista with STABILITY and SECURITY. This is a policy - not a technical decision.

What does this mean? The compositor will indeed run more slowly (in software) when a full-blown OpenGL app is run. In most cases this does not seem like an all that huge issue, it ought to be plenty usable anyway (try tunning OSX without Quartz Extreme, it is a bit more sluggish, but not unusable). And for the typical light OpenGL app (non-games) the wrapper will probably do OK and then not interfere with the compositor.

Sure it would have been much better if the hardware compositor and an OpenGL ICD could work together, but it is on the other hand also clear that it would most likely have been a lot messier for both Microsoft and driver writes to achieve (basicly an OpenGL context is to be composited into a scene drawn by a Direct3D context). But it is hardly the end of the world for OpenGL, notably pretty much no games at all will be affected at all since one does not tend to window-manage a great deal while playing a game.

If I have misunderstood the available information I apologize, but if this is correct it is, while maybe not ideal, hardly the sky falling either.

I've always had to own at least one additional windows box to do quite a lot of programming on windows. Well, it's all about JNI-Bindings in my case...

So -- A fast VirtualPC would be like a miracle, and I suspect VMWare guys will get into the ring. I really love Apple for this step, because I really enjoy Mac OS X. For me this means I can get a decent Apple-PowerBook with excellent performance and top notch Windows-compatibility!

I expect some more players getting into the game:

• Game industry - porting of OpenGL powered games gets easier (= cheaper) than ever, no more AltiVec
• Wine and (of course) CodeWeavers for Wine/CrossOver Office on OS X
• Lot of heavily optimized media-related stuff running exclusively on Intel boxes due to SSE, SSE2, MMX...
• Much more Linux-stuff due to easier compilation of "poorly programmed" software that doesn't respect endianess and other stuff

Now, if only eclipse got faster on OS X!

Gave Linux XFS Scaled Linux beyond 32 CPUs In regards to OpenGL vs Direct 3D, I have heard that D3D has gotten way better since Carmack made those comments. HOWEVER, it's still just Microsoft that controls all of DirectX. But just look at the orgs and people that are on the OpenGL board, even their emails addresses are public: http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/overview.html http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/notes/meeting_note _2004-12-07.html

Gave Linux XFS Scaled Linux beyond 32 CPUs In regards to OpenGL vs Direct 3D, I have heard that D3D has gotten way better since Carmack made those comments. HOWEVER, it's still just Microsoft that controls all of DirectX. But just look at the orgs and people that are on the OpenGL board, even their emails addresses are public: http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/overview.html http://www.opengl.org/about/arb/notes/meeting_note _2004-12-07.html

I said this years ago when working for a VR centre using SGI systems and saw the centre migrate more and more of their workstations to cost and performance effective NT systems.

NVIDIA were becoming a big player, yet SGI was responsible for the extremely popular 3D library we were using.

Their arrogance was partly to blame, they never did confess that the gaming industry would come to define the "3D graphics workstation" and that VR was fast becoming a ghost train. Instead they sent girls around in push-up bras selling upgrade licenses.

I'd also suggest the red book as a companion/reference. The OpenGL consortium's site also has some some documentation and tutorials (e.g. the spec downloadable in PDF form.)

If PS3 adopts Linux, it's an opportunity for linux to get noticed by the games industry. They might realise that there is a market left unexploited.

They might also realise that if their games use OpenGL instead of DirectX they can run on any platform, whether it's windows or linux. So there is *no* extra cost in supporting linux.

If all games were published on linux as well as on windows, and linux was an equavalent gaming platform, gamers would sure go with linux, instead of windows, cause you don't have to spend something like £80 for an OS. Instead you can spend the extra money you saved on your favorite games. And that's even more sales for game publishers.

I wish they could see that. Could this be the beginning of linux as a gaming platform?

Why do you think we don't have that?

SDL - http://www.libsdl.org/index.php
OpenAL - http://www.openal.org/
OpenGL - http://www.opengl.org/

These are - specially SDL - very matured things and lot of games are coded in them.

One of the great things (among others) is that the Mac uses the opengl graphics layer for gaming. Thankfully, so does Linux. Mac popularity is preventing opengl from dying on the vine as a "Linux-only API" that would have to compete directly with DirectX. *sigh of relief*

They also aren't fantastically hard to recreate. There are plenty of third-party cross platform sound, input and networking libraries.

Regardless, in this case we're discussing a graphical application.

When a DirectX game gets ported to OS X or any other platform you'll often find that the multiplayer is limited to the platform you're using.

Or not. World of Warcraft comes to mind, for instance.

Perhaps someone can suggest some other libraries/frameworks for input/sound/networking. There's GLUT for input, but it's pretty simple so it might not work for everyone.

OpenML and OpenAL are two possibilities. Another thought might be to use a modern programming environment like Java, and use its abstracted sound, input and networking along with OpenGL. You could always write your own wrapper library in your language of choice as well. You could also use a third-party cross platform game engine like the Torque engine that supports OpenGL.

Here's a good link for those that'd like to learn more about OpenGL in general.

The benefit to DirectX is that it does so much for the developer, it takes care of sound/input/networking. All of which aren't fantastically easy to recreate, unfortunately.

When a DirectX game gets ported to OS X or any other platform you'll often find that the multiplayer is limited to the platform you're using.

Perhaps someone can suggest some other libraries/frameworks for input/sound/networking. There's GLUT for input, but it's pretty simple so it might not work for everyone.

There are very few things you can do with DX90 and can't with OpenGL extensions. And yes, OpenGL, and OpenGL extensions ARE a standard. DirectX is not.

You can actually find full-featured multi-platform 3D engines such as OGRE, that lets you choose between D3D or OpenGL at runtime. No 3D API dependence anymore.

D3DX is regularily updated, GLU hasn't been updated in years

OpenGL 2.0 was released 7 September 2004.

The TODO list for the DRI driver has it mentioned in the Big Projects section.

OpenGL is just an API, that card drivers can implement. It's the same idea as DirectX.

You can even render the Mandelbrot set on a video card. There's an example of this in the OpenGL Shading Language manual (the orange book).

http://opengl.org/documentation/books.html#oglsl

I beg to differ:

• Direct3D - OpenGL, cross platform.
• DirectSound - OpenAL, cross platform.
• DirectShow - QuickTime, Windows and Mac. I don't know of any truly cross platform (Windows, Mac and *NIX) alternatives.
• DirectPlay - OpenPlay, cross platform.
• DirectInput - SDL, cross platform.

It's because of bugs in the OpenGL drivers, that seem to be fixed in the 10.3.6 version
I guess ID Software and Apple have worked together on theses problems.

As for Linux version (with the poor ATI support for Doom3), I'm really glad that such application like Doom3 shed the light on bugs and force the constructors (like nVidia, ATI or Apple) to improves their OpenGL implementations.
This is a benefit for all the OpenGL developers, especially on OSX, where alternative to OpenGL is out of question.

Most FPSs do, but id software, for some reason, seems to prefer an OPEN, NON-MICROSOFT standard which is available for most platforms (OpenGL).

Here is the official specifications of the OpenGL 2.0 in PDF format.

er, opengl.org that should be. not opengl.com, though that will take you to opengl.org anyway. alas, just clicky clicky

The OpenGL Programming Guide is available from opengl.com in electronic form. It's an older edition, but i have been using it anyway.

Someone care to explain what that means?
From the "What's New" document:

Point Sprites

* Point sprites replace point texture coordinates with texture coordinates interpolated across the point. This allows drawing points as customized textures, useful for particle systems.
Point sprites were promoted from the ARB point sprite extension, with the further addition of the POINT SPRITE COORD ORIGIN parameter controlling the direction in which the t texture coordinate increases.

http://www.opengl.org/documentation/opengl_current _version.html

Its used for a lot of popular games including Doom 3, Return to Castel Wolfenstein, Quake series, etc. See http://www.opengl.org/applications/windows/games/ for a list of the windows games using OpenGL

How about
OpenGL,
SDL and OpenAL?

OpenAL for one is something few people seem to know about. I've developed sound systems using both DirectSound/DirectMusic directly as well as OpenAL - and there are worlds of difference between MS's obfuscated crAPI and OpenAL - It's actually a pleasure to write a capable 3D sound system on top of OpenAL.

We have the open standards. What I think we really need is more information for developers starting Linux development. More tutorials, more books, and more publically available (read: web) articles on how to get certain things to work under Linux, to make it easier for software engineers to make the transition and/or port of their software to Linux.

Finding good, clear sources of information on how to get certain things done is what I've found to be the biggest hurdle to start developing software for Linux. Maybe I just didn't know where and how to look, but I imagine I'm not the only one involved in programming, who has had that problem.

It's called the OpenGL Shading Language.

One product that striked me as really slick was an image manager being demonstrated @ the nVidia booth called Taos Image Finder.

Apparently, it uses OpenGL shaders or GLSL, which is now part of the recently announced OpenGL 2.0, to do real time image filtering. It's pretty neat. The user interface is kinda space age and nothing like what you would expect to see in an image manager. It can search images based on color and shape and the results were very accurate. Definitely worth a look.

The stonybrook monitor was another stunning demo and it was hard to believe that such fantastic imagery could be displayed on a monitor. Apparently it costs somewhere around $90K :) , a tad expensive compared to my $150 19" :)

One product that striked me as really slick was an image manager being demonstrated @ the nVidia booth called Taos Image Finder.

Apparently, it uses OpenGL shaders or GLSL, which is now part of the recently announced OpenGL 2.0, to do real time image filtering. It's pretty neat. The user interface is kinda space age and nothing like what you would expect to see in an image manager. It can search images based on color and shape and the results were very accurate. Definitely worth a look.

The stonybrook monitor was another stunning demo and it was hard to believe that such fantastic imagery could be displayed on a monitor. Apparently it costs somewhere around $90K :) , a tad expensive compared to my $150 19" :)

I'm very interested in good OpenGL performance, since my Linux workstation is used for scientific graphics.

So are there any comparisons of rough benchmarks of such performance for recently-released videocards, along the lines of SPECviewperf?

Then go petition MS to create and distribute cards that supports their gd standard in hardware. I don't use Windows and have no interest in paying a fee to MS for having DX9 embedded into a card when I'll never be able to use it. If MS wants to pay for it and it's a zero cost addition for nVIDIA and it doesn't adversely affect OpenGL performance, then it would be inconsequential to me if it were included or not. Btw, what companies are in the consortium that controls the DirectX industry standard?

If you're going at the programming by yourself, I would strongly recommend you use a library to save you from having to write your own low-level access routines (unless you just want to learn about how all these whiz-bang effects are done, but that may distract you from the goal of getting a game finished). Unless you have commerical backing, or are absolutely sure you have the willpower to stick to the project (by "absolutely sure", I mean you've done it before right to the bitter end and want to do it again), I would recommend using as hing-a-level library as possible.

There are several out there with their advantages and dis-advantages. Some of them are Microsoft DirectX., OpenGL, Allegro and SDL. High-level libraries are good for beginners and are useful for rapidly developping games. You can accomplish a lot with a few lines of code, but they can make the executable size bloat, and sometimes, you may want more control over the system. Low-level libraries are useful for control-freaks who want more control of what's going on.They let you access the system with little overhead, but require a lot of work to get to work. DirectX and OpenGL are low-level libraries, Allegro is a high-level library, and SDL is somewhere in the middle.

Also, check to see which platforms the library is available for. DirectX is only available for Microsoft, whereas OpenGL, SDL and Allegro let you write programs that can be ported to a multitude of systems and OS's.

Personally, I use Allegro, but other people may have different requirements or desires to dig down deep into the hardware.

There is the current and likely very temporary issue of nvidia's drivers only partially supporting GLSL (and only through a registry hack with very up-to-date drivers at that), not to mention a few limitations of the language itself.

The fact is, however, that the language spec is down, it has already undergone revision, and the compiler is open source. Support for the language will undoubtably grow with time. OpenGL's core strength is its stability.

One of the main reasons, so I understand, for the language's longish delay is the somewhat more democratic process of the ARB as compared to the way MS internally decides the path of DirectX, which has often led to more than a few arguments between the different members.

It will grow strong and, with a bit of luck, could serve as the basis doing some really experimental stuff.

There is the current and likely very temporary issue of nvidia's drivers only partially supporting GLSL (and only through a registry hack with very up-to-date drivers at that), not to mention a few limitations of the language itself.

The fact is, however, that the language spec is down, it has already undergone revision, and the compiler is open source. Support for the language will undoubtably grow with time. OpenGL's core strength is its stability.

One of the main reasons, so I understand, for the language's longish delay is the somewhat more democratic process of the ARB as compared to the way MS internally decides the path of DirectX, which has often led to more than a few arguments between the different members.

It will grow strong and, with a bit of luck, could serve as the basis doing some really experimental stuff.

"Basically, Core Image means that any developer can write code that offloads image processing work to the GPU without knowing anything about how to program the GPU."

You mean like just about every graphic abstraction level out there? Do you think anyone programs low-level pixel shaders anymore?

There's nothing in Core that hasn't been done before, or is in the process of being created. Avalon is pretty much going to use DirectX from the ground up. By the time Tiger comes out, we'll be one year away from (presumably) Longhorn. By then, if all OSs aren't using similar tech something is seriously wrong.

Since many cell phones are using Java for the applications and games, I would not be surprised if the next step would be to include support for OpenGL, especially given that Nvidia and ATI are playing part. There are already OpenGL bindings for Java, though the one that is likely to show most evolution, given the backing, is JOGL.

man page.
e.g., man glBegin.
Actually, hypertexting through this the docs found here is even better.

Go check it out and decide for yourself. While you're at it, you might even want to check out the specs. A word of caution, however. The specs are really intended for card and GL server manufacturers. As a result, it tends to go into a lot of details that are often irrelevant to developing OpenGL applications.