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OpenGL 2.0 Released
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."
Weird. I've been seeing cards claiming to be OpenGL 2.0 compatible for a while now.
Isn't it used for the Unreal Engine games and a lot of the Q3 engine games? There's a lot of games based on each of those engines.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Lets hope that this will encourage more developers to switch to OpenGL. Yeah, I know the argument abt Direct3D being better (and I agree with it) but the new ver of OpenGL might just be good enough and arent the game developers always on the lookout for ways to get the massive linux gamers market
Can OpenGL ever match DX in popularity among developers?
One word: portability
those cards have been able to do fragment and pixel shaders etc through openGL extensions, hence the xxx_ARB_EXT calls. this i assume is the release of all those extensions into the core of the OPENGL pipeline and thus will eventually be without the ARB into the call..
All I know is that this has been a long time in the coming and is great news, especially as MS has just announced the discontinuement of DX past the current version. Finally some competition to DX in modern games, however I really hope this will help people such as myself who do 3D work in Maya and such. Maya has just included a new feature that lets the viewports do a realtime high-quality openGL render as you work on your model/scene, so this can only make that faster and better (though as of right now, realistically speaking it isnt usable nor stable for actual work). Now for ATI to include serious openGL support for its cards & drivers...
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
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
The new functionalities were in the previous versions as extensions AFAIK, OpenGL 2.0 adds them to the standard.
So (unless I missed something that wasn't previously an extension), you just need a new driver for your card and you'll be set.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Can OpenGL ever match DX in popularity among developers?
Yes. id (quake, doom, etc) and I believe unreal both use it. Both are competitors, and as small of importance as portability to other operating systems such as Linux may seem to be, it is still somewhat important to them (although, I -still- haven't heard anything new about doom3 on linux)
Interest into porting to Linux is slowly becoming more popular between game makers, mostly because if you do it right for the windows port in the first place, it isn't as difficult as it might seem to port to Linux, and it helps open up a small new (starved?) market.
Game developers? Probably not any time soon. Developers of visualisation applications and the such? No-one seriously uses Direct3D for that.
Obviously DirectX has such things as DirectSound which don't really have alternatives under Windows, though.
I can't wait to try out some of these features, in 20 years when ATi implements them properly into their drivers, that is.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Maybe now that it is 'officially' out Bioware will take that into consideration and green light the Linux/OSX port for Neverwinter Nights 2.
The game is still early enough in development that they could still switch from DX and not have much impact in the release date
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Only two years behind the times!
Just different enough from existing GPU programming languages to be annoying, without any added functionality or ease of use!
No standard intermediate representation, requiring OpenGL drivers to contain full-blown compilers! Hello, latency!
OpenGL -- the best API and shading language a politics-laden commitee could design!
Seriously, if it weren't for Mr. Carmack, the dinosaur that is OpenGL would be deader than the dodo bird. Sad, as I spend half my day developing OpenGL apps, but true.
Supporting OpenGL 2.0 is the job of the drivers, which didn't support it so far simply because the specification didn't exist. The cards have all the capabilities necessary to support OpenGL 2.0, which makes sense if you understand the development process of OpenGL: The card makers come up with some new feature, and they can immediately implement it in the form of an extension and release it with their driver. After some time, the new features become generally supported, so the ARB looks over the extensions and makes an ARB extension out of it that the card makers have to implement again. This means that the new features of OpenGL 2.0 are actually just the features that the cards already have put together into one API.
You really have no idea what you're talking about do you. OpenGL vs D3D flamewars have been raging for years, FYI D3D started out well behind OpenGL feature for feature and gradually added OpenGL features, each generation of D3D we had to listen to Microsoft claim that all the interesting features of OpenGL were already in D3D and OpenGL had no advantage, only for them to add more in the next release.
D3D is a proprietary windows programming API owned by Microsoft and designed for games with some incredibly ugly and arduous API semantics, OpenGL is an open, extensible cross platform industry standard controlled by a board of interested industry specialists that anyone may join. The rendering and dispatch API semqantics have been optimized by the vendors in a standard way. If there was a need for any particular feature the vendors would add it as an extension either individually (something they can do and have done on their own) or they could collaborate on shared extensiosn for a common API. Red herring features that do not make any sense or map to real hardware have no place in a programming interface explicitly designed to sit close to the metal like OpenGL.
While I love OpenGL far more than DX, your argument would be better served by not listing games that are all from the same company. (or at least, using engines from the same company)
Um, what do you think OpenGL 2.0 is? It's a specification.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You used to be able to draw "dots" on the resulting screen, used for whats called "particle effects", like mud spraying out of the back wheel of an offroad racer, for instance. Very simply (quicky) drawn because you're just handing out x,y coordinates for htem.
Now, rather than just colored dots, you can use textures or sprites (little pictures). So instead of a cloud of brown dots coming from a dirt bikes rear tire, you could have little chunks of rocks and grass. Or rather than a cloud of red dots coming out of a guys head when you shoot it, you could have little chunks of brain and skull.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The benefits include Programable Shaders, in particular: Shader Objects, Shader Programs, OpenGL Shading Language and changes to the Shader API.
Look, all I want to know is if I can shade something.
Still, as a former OpenGL developer I must say that while OpenGL is nice it is far from perfect.
The API is very C-centered, which is nice, if you develop in C; we however developed in other languages, which more suitable for enterprise apps where stability and floatingpoint correctes is AO.
I'm not fond of OOP, but it sure makes sense when you deal with visual objects, and OpenGL doesn't really feel OO. Dealing with OpenGL for Lisp or Python is easy, but sure as hell ain't pretty.
Are you kidding?
Come on, thats no argument. There is NO linux gamers market worth mentioning, and there is NO massive linux market in the first place.
A better argument:
OpenGL is a long standing industry standard which give developers more control over the way stuff gets rendered. Its simple, straightforward and does not depend on a large, antropophagic competitor, platform owner like Microsoft.
And THATS why ID uses it. So the MS wont choke them by controlling that critical part of the API.
Not many developers have the muscle ID has to invest in remaking a lot of stuff DX already provides, but for some sizes, its worth it.
NO SIG
Hardware tends not to be very object oriented and C++ can quite happily call C.
While I agree OO has advantages in some situations with a low level graphics API I don't think that's the case the only real omission in OpenGL caused by the C interface is function overloading for the various argument types to a few functions. That would clean up a few things.
In 3D graphics OO really kicks into it's own when it comes to higher level APIs like scene graphs and there are numerous examples. These can and do benefit greatly from OO design but nobody has come up with a compelling low level hardware interface that justified OO. Sure you could wrap a few things in a class or two but there's no compelling architectural justification and attepmts to wrap OpenGL in a trivial namespace class and call it OO are horribly naive and misguided.
Excuse me, sir, but in order for your Troll Post to be compliant with OpenTroll 2.0 Standards, you will need to implement the spelling of "the" with the standard "teh." Thank You Very Much, the Mgmnt
-end of post.
At this point, DirectX is at least 4.5x better than OpenGL.
Heh, spoken like someone who has never written a line of graphics code in their life. If you read Carmack's original OpenGL .plan you'll see that he was talking about how much cleaner OpenGL was to call.
You don't cite a reference w.r.t OpenGL & Carmack, it is clearly FUD. The only dissatisfaction I've seen from Carmack was in the Cg vs glslang hardware abstraction, I won't explain it, it's too technical for you but basically Carmack was advocating the futureproof open aproach and in some respects he got his way, however Doom3 calls ARBfp and ARBvp shaders anyway.
Carmack has never waivered from his OpenGL support and the only issue he's taken a public stand on in the API was as I said, shaders where he expressed a dislike for Cg and Cg is very similar to HLSL in D3D so Carmack was taking a stand against a shader approach that is used in D3D.
OpenGL has been around longer than D3D, is a lot cleaner in design, it has a clear unambiguius specification and has conformance tests to ensure quality of implementation. OpenGL is also portable to non-Windows platforms. All of these are excellent reasons to use OpenGl that have nothing to do with being non-Microsoft.
3D graphics is something that no sane developer would ever lock himself to a proprietary API like Direct3D. More and more companies use OpenGL for their games, and now with 2.0 even more will ever use it. Using OpenGL has the additional benefit of porting a game to architectures other than Windows. As for other parts of DirectX, there are various combinations that can do the job: OpenGL + SDL, OpenGL + AllegroGL + Allegro, etc.
People always post this crap and it's never a good idea.
Look, here's an example of something you CAN'T do with a boot disk game:
Bob: "Hey, Joe, let's play some Return to Castle Wolfenstein."
Joe: "Cool. Wanna do the voicecomm?"
Bob: "Sure. Let's use Roger Wilco, my IP's 127.0.0.1"
Joe: "Rock, see you there."
(Or whatever those wacky kids are using these days for voicecomm in games.)
Here's another little skit:
Joe: "I just bought a new ATIVidia SuperCard that has 20 times the performance of older cards!"
Bob: "Awesome! Boot up 'Super Linux Brothers' and let's see how it runs!"
Joe inserts Linux CD that boots into game.
Joe: "Screen's just black."
Bob: "Shit, must be missing the driver..."
Joe: "How the hell do you put a driver on a already-burnt CD?!? This game sucks!"
And here's a third:
Joe: "Here, try my copy of 'Super Linux Brothers.'"
Bob: "Ok."
Bob runs game.
Bob: "These controls are really awkward."
Joe: "I know, it took me like three hours to get controls I liked... just use my control set."
Bob: "Where is it?"
Joe: "Shit, it's saved on my HD at home! I forgot to bring it! Goddamned."
I hope I've demonstrated that having a boot disk for a game is a BAD idea, and why nobody will buy a game distributed that way. There's a reason we haven't done that since the 80s, you know.
Comment of the year
You seem to be very confused. XBOX is basically a GeForce3 system with some extra vertex processors, yes it supports D3D but your assumptions about APIs are wrong. NVIDIA actually extended D3D on the XBOX with a few OpenGL like features that don't even exist today on Windows versions of D3D. So rather than D3D giving hardware the advantage it holds developers back, in a situation where hardware developers are free to extend (as they can with OpenGL) they do and bring innovative hardware features to developers early. In the unique case of the XBOX NVIDIA actually threw in a few extra functions they'd always wanted to expose on Windows D3D but couldn't because D3D didn't let them. With the shackles off on XBOX they did.
The only reason D3D is the API on XBOX is a Microsoft business decision, technical merits have nothing to do with it.
Learn DX or D3D? You do know that D3D is discontinued and Avalon is the replacement so what will it look like? I personally suspect they'll clean up D3D and it may wind up looking a lot different. The graphics scheduling, and resource/context management will obviously be a major issue/headache.
As for OpenGL, OpenGL|ES will have way more volume than longhorn units shipped, it will be on every mobile device. So I could justifiably claim that if you don't learn OpenGL|ES now you will be left behind, but I'd never say anything so silly.
Cross platform compatability is often a major goal but it depends on your project and what you're developing. Let's be clear, the hardware details and graphics programming requirements tend not to change from platform to platform, so OpenGL suitability is not compromised by it's cross platform support, it just happens to be supported on many platforms. Hardware acceleration and consistent implementation are the primary design goals of OpenGL and it succeeds spectacularly well. Implying that because it is cross platform it is somehow compromised ignores the fact that the only reason D3D is single platform (or even exists for that matter) is Microsoft's proprietary control of the market.
APIs are indeed most of the work. Learning a language completely is simple (unless it's perl, and no, that's not a flamebait), but it's the APIs that make you an effective coder. When I first started web-coding, I knew next to nothing. It took me a while to find my way around things in perl (the Camel book helped). I'm pretty sure if tomorrow I need to do a Java Enterprise project, I'll be messing about for a couple of weeks in finding my way. Unfortunatly this is a fact that many managers seem to forget.
When I first read the openGL API I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of books on the subject.
When I thought about it for a while, I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of math books teaching me the skills I need to do things.
When I got a girlfriend, I gave up on the "running to the bookstore for knowledge" and started thinking about other things.
When said girlfriend and I broke up, I was preparing for endterms.
When I got a job, I thought "I'll have time in the evenings to learn new stuff".
When I was working for 3 months I discovered that I really didn't want to code at home anymore.
When they fired me (yesterday) I thought "I wish I'd spent some time learning openGL."
So the simple way to understand OpenGL code is to think of a really big state machine. Each call just modifies the currently existing state. The state persists until the state is changed - even to the point of maintaining it between rendered frames.
If you want Java bindings for OpenGL, there's two major projects.
JOGL, which is the basis for the formal bindings in JSR 231.
LWJGL which is a community driven project and somewhat akin to DirectX in that it also merges audio and input device APIs as well.
If you need some tutorials to get started, check out http://opengl.j3d.org in a couple of weeks when it gets officially opened and has lots of beginner tutorials to play with.
After that, the OpenGL Red Book is your friend.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton