OpenGL 2.0 White Papers

Timothy J. Wood writes "3DLabs has posted a series of white papers on OpenGL 2.0 covering topics such as improving parallelism, timing control, minimizing data movement programmable pixel pack and unpack and (most notably) a proposal for a hardware independent shading language."

Comments

Meeting minutes

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Also of interest is the meeting minutes where the opengl panel discuss the implications of this leap, and raise some interesting questions:

> Bimal: Devil's Advocacy question: why do we want OpenGL to survive? If IHVs can't articulate this and drive progress, it won't survive.

I'd be really sad to see OpenGL go. Its the only way I've been able to fart around with all that graphic lovelness since University, doing my bit with deformable objects.

I hope they get their finger out and pull it off. Apple should be helping to sponsor this sort of thing really IMHO...

Re:What about..

[Captain Pedantic]

Something like SDL you mean?

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'f you'd followed the link to libsdl.org you'd see it IS win32 compatible, as well as a number of other platforms.

Re:In a nutshell: OpenGL2 good; "Pure" OpenGL bad

[DGolden]

Yes, well, the way OpenGL development works is that the features first show up as a "Vendor Extension", then if they're any good, the Architecture Review Board sits down and folds them into the main specification. You're just seeing the middle of this process. But, hey, the process works, and it's picking up speed again,
after a whole load of (largely MS-related) shenanigans involving the ARB and SGI (MS basically did the same to SGI as they did to IBM with OS/2 and WNT, with a project called "Fahrenheit" - which wasted lots of SGI's time and money. SGI should have known better than to deal with MS)

Since Apple and BSD, commercial unix and Linux are now all firmly on the OpenGL path, it's unlikely OpenGL will go away...

Re:Way too late.

[Mike Connell]

Not really. Most people using windows for 3d graphics in the workstation area are using a high end graphics card. By that I mean GeForce3 or faster.

They all come with OpenGL drivers. You dont even notice that MS doesn't ship them. Install video cards drivers, get OpenGL.

MS is really in a position to lose market here to Linux because of this: Linux on a PC with fast 3d (via nvidia for example) is infinitely more like the workstation being replaced than NT on a PC is.

At the higher workstation end (higher than GeForce3), people aren't yet looking at windows because the hardware isn't there anyway.

I think it'll be a while before OpenGL dies, especially as in all markets people are finally moving up the ladder - to scenegraph API's like this one.

If the SG supports both DX and OGL backends then you dont even have to think about it.

my random 0.02,
Mike

Re:What about..

[jonathan_ingram]

*S*imple *D*irectmedia *L*ayer

It's a very low level media abstraction library, together with a lot of small extensions which add support for image processing, truetype fonts, sound mixing, etc.

http://www.libsdl.org/libraries.html
shows what extension libraries to SDL exist.

Re:What about..

[DGolden]

Simple Directmedia Layer. It, and associated add-on SDL_* libraries, provide simple, easy to understand and use, pure C APIs to the basics a game developer would want. It handles input/output, and acts as a gate to OpenGL for 3D.

(from SDLsite:)

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power." Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Win32, BeOS, MacOS, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, ML, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.


Pretty much all commercial games on linux use SDL, as well as most new little games on linux, and a fair proportion of them on windows and MacOS

See here for more details.