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."

What about..

[nervlord1]

I really wish an open source group would release some sort of sound-graphics-animation libary for windows that directly competes with direct X. why would it rock? Simple porting of windows games to linux One less area Microsoft has a stranglehold on Games development would be easier for open source programmers A good games libary for linux Wed already have 3d and Direct 3d covered with open gl, we just gotta get the rest of the stuff covered. But IMO i think this might happen sooner than you think, it is my firm belif that once the Xbox gains motion ms will drop support of Direct X on the pc in order to convince PC games developers to come develop for its Xbox. It would make alot of business sense to do that. YMMV

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

OpenGL is unlikely to go - after all, DirectX only exists on Wintel/XBox. Scientific and industrial visualisation applications are pretty much all OpenGL, and are pretty much all designed for Unix and Linux (there are rickety ports to WNT from Unix), and depend on the design for high-poly-count and easy C and FORTRAN compatibility of OpenGL. The fancy-texturing facilities of DirectX are largely irrelevant, and the requirement to use C++ or (bleurgh!) a COM interface in other languages, makes it difficult to use DirectX for anything "serious".

The margins for software and hardware vendors in this market are much larger, and more secure, than in the games software market (where most products barely break even) - you can get away with charging £20000 a year for a license to many specialised programs.

Re:Way too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone in the "heavy workstation" area - MS is being squeezed OUT of that environment, not growing into it. Linux is popping up, left, right and centre. Since the applications people run on "heavy workstations" tend be OpenGL-on-IRIX applications, it's a no-brainer to use Mesa-on-Linux instead. Maya (CGI), Fluent (CFD), etc, etc, are all shipping linux versions, and are seeing a drop in takeup of WNT stuff.

SDL is just that...

[Tord]

I know others have allready said this but as a former game developer, with more than 6 years of professional experience, I just want to add some weight to the argument that SDL indeed is what you are asking for.

I've never used SDL professionally (I've used Direct-X, Glide, PlayStation specific API's and some old inhouse stuff for DOS), but I've toyed around with it in my sparetime and I would have no trouble trusting it as the foundation for a high-quality cross-platform game (both 2D and 3D). In fact, I would rather use it than Direct-X since I find the API simpler and more straight forward as long as I don't need some obscure Direct-X feature for performance reasons (most games don't).

The URL is www.libsdl.org if you want to check it out.

I hate being the voice of reason...

[Mongoose]

I'd like to inform everyone in these groups:

a) OpenGL is dead!

b) OpenGL is out of date

c) Let's ditch OpenGL and do DirectX

DirectX isn't the same thing as OpenGL, however you can compare D3D and OpenGL. DirectX is for sound, input, and rendering not just rendering, kids.

OpenGL will outlive D3D, since it's what big iron and the 'professionals' use for high end graphics. Also hardware vendors produce GL extentions way before D3D work has even started. GL can use extentions made *after it's release to support more features quickly and easily. ( If you're in one of these camps you never done 3d development, or think all computers are consumer PCs. )

Also if you use DirectX, you're limiting yourself needlessly. If you want the "latest and greatest" , then you're not going to use an API that has no modular extention system to support hw/ideas made after the API release. OpenGL can support hw/algorthims that happened *after it's release. OpenGL also runs on manchines a lot more powerful than your pentium 4 you bought at comp usa.

Re:Meeting minutes

[DGolden]

(a) mainframes are still around. If anything they're experiencing massive growth, thanks to IBM remarketing them as ultra-reliable linux virtual server solutions.

(b) As a mechanical engineer and computational fluid dynamicist, I assure you, the workstations are not "dominated by windows" - most people are still on SGIs, and the majority of those that aren't are moving to Linux, not Windows NT, under the advice of the application vendors, who find supporting their apps on linux much less of a pain than on WinNT.

Unix Clusters aren't going away either. Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do. Depending on the application, there's a spectrum of cost/performance solutions that may be worthwhile - if you're simulating a nuclear explosion, and CPUs get more powerful, you don't necessarily downsize, you might make the simulation more accurate by using roughly the same amount of computers to do much more. Human's AREN'T able to simulate the physical world with complete accuracy - but the more calculations, the better (assuming perfect programming), at least until you hit quantum limits, and then it takes EVEN MORE power to do probabilistic predictions via monte-carlo or sum-over-histories....