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The State of OpenGL
CowboyRobot writes "No longer vapor, but a true 3D-embedded engine, OpenGL is on the move. Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime, and that desire has prompted the intended release of OpenGL 2.0, due in a few months. Khronos is now in charge of further extending OpenGL to cellphones and handheld gaming devices."
When will they figure it out OpenGL is not necessarily desirable in a cellular phone?
I want business class reliability, not a the ability to rent subpar games on my cell phone for $5/month.
When I'm on the phone all day because of my work I want it to be there for important calls, not fizzle out after an hour because it's got a 640x480 pixel screen with 24-bit color.
Although right now OpenGL is all that's out there for low-cost portable embedded 3D software, no one is going to develop with it until hardware support emerges. Who wants a handheld 3D mapping device that takes 10 seconds to redraw a frame using an ARM9 software renderer?
Hopefully, this will prompt more developers to join efforts to create a feature rich gaming framework for *nix. SDL is a great start, but lags behind DirectX in a number of ways. I look forward to seeing this 2.0 release breathe new life/blood into this area of development.
Thank you for your time,
BBH
Say what?
You don't get much higher-level than a scenegraph API like Java3D.
I think the author may have been confused, although he did get the overall point right. OpenGL ES on J2ME will probably be the way this goes.
FUNK!
The current handheld devices are not suitable for 2D/3D graphics, because their memory bandwidth is so poor that texturemapping will make the software crawl. I'd get excited when the mobile devices get real 3D hardware acceleration. Even a 400MHz XScale doesn't cut the mustard if it spends its time waiting for the memory. Have been using OpenGL ES for over six months now...
For one, direct3d is integrated into the direct api which handles a multitude of things, multimedia and game input devices among others, that game developers are almost naturally drawn to by the appeal that so much work has already been done for them
OpenGL can't and really shouldn't have to address all these requirements, but it's just part of why there's been this ongoing struggle. SDL is a reasonable answer to portability while still accomplishing the integration that MS has achieved, but SDL isn't really as mainstream as OpenGL is.
I've seen soap opera plots that were less convoluted than this mess.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I really love it when shills post things like this. Can we please see some documented facts to back any of this up?
Innovative? They didn't do jack with 3D until OpenGL came along and showed them how. They had to buy it from SGI. This has been documented.
Resilient? Dictionary.com defines this as "Marked by the ability to recover readily, as from misfortune." This is actually true, as they were behind, and had to play catch-up. 10 years later, they have caught up with (and arguably surpassed) a technology that has changed very little. Until now.
If this is what defines one who "rules," I'd rather that MSFT "rules" while other companies and organizations just make better stuff.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
They've all missed the point. Duke 3D was impressive because you could BREAK THINGS. The environment wasn't just there for show, you could interact with it in pleasantly destructive ways. Quake I disliked because, while it was beautiful to look at, you really couldn't do much but open doors and use elevators. I LIKED the way I could be in the middle of a network gunfight in Duke, run up to the second floor of a building, KICK out the window with my foot (with glass shards falling around me) and blaze away. After an intense battle on a dance floor, we would have shot out the mirror behind the bar, blasted all the liquor bottles into particles, and shattered vases, flowerpots and ashtrays all over the place with appropriate sound effects. That was very cool, and really enhanced the overall immersivity of the game. When it was over we would just look around at all the destruction and cheer.
Duke's overall game percentaging was very well-thought-out. The impact of various munitions was adjusted such that you didn't die too quickly, but still the relative damage levels incurred appeared realistic. And again, when a pipe bomb or a laser trip bomb went off, it would destroy any nearby breakable objects or windows, as you would expect it to do. In games like Half Life or Quake, everything around you is pretty much explosion and/or bulletproof, and that isn't particularly realistic.
Playability is the key to a game with staying power, and playability is, unfortunately, not something that has achieved much focus in recent games. It also is not intrinsically bound up with the graphic quality of the visual environment. The majority of development effort has been expended in creating gorgeous 3-D environments, not good games. A game is supposed to be entertaining, and once the "oooh!" and "ahhhh!" wears off, if the product isn't truly playable you'll find yourself not playing it no matter how pretty the pictures are. At that point you've just wasted your money.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
As TD who works in the computer graphics field, let me state that the technology required to render a Pixar film in 'Real Time' is far off and ridiculous. Just because OpenGL looks better does not mean that it can support the shader functions that Renderman utilizes, not to mention the Fur and cloth APIs. Also, the majority of shots in movies aren't even single comp shots they involve many rendered elements, which you still have to comp together. I'd be all for the guy talking about how OpenGL 2.0 will benefit the artists by allowing them to get more feedback about the quality of the shot they're working on without preview renders, but thinking that OGL could replace final renders any time soon is wrong. Perhaps we are geting to a place where we could render the original Toy Story realtime and a general viewing audience might not know the difference. Perhaps. But I remember some really great PRman shaders from the film that wouldn't be posible in the real time version.
1) Its Apple's implementation of GL that's less than perfectly optimized. On Windows and Linux, OpenGL is as fast as D3D.
2) OpenGL has numerous releases in the last few years. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 were all released in quick succession. What rock have you been hiding under?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"Over the next year or two, I think you're going to see a whole range of applications that use your graphics board as a supercomputer," Trevett says enthusiastically.
was the most interesting part of the article?
SETI@home, Finite Element Analysis, video recoding are all areas which could benefit from vector processing , matrix calculation and/or huge register sizes provided by GPUs.
I remember seeing an image of that in an old computer graphics "coffee table"-type book back in high school - and you mentioning that popped it in my head...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon