SDL, PBuffers, dim3

SDL Development
1

My name is Brian Barnes, I’m the author of dim3, a free OS X 3D
Engine (www.klinksoftware.com).

I’ve been asked a number of times to make it cross-platform, and SDL
would cover the two necessary areas (OpenGL setup and Events.) I’ve
googled around and looked at the headers, and so far I’ve only seen
proposals for pbuffer support, which is something I need.

I’m using the 1.2.8 build.

Is this something that has been worked on, will be worked on, or is
in the CVS and not the binaries (I won’t be able to use it until it’s
part of the actual binary releases, as I need it to be installed by
end-users.)

I apologize in advance if this question has been asked before as I
found no answers searching the list archives.

Also, if there is any linux/windows people out there that would like
to take a shot at the port (it’s a small amount of the code which is
restricted to a single library) I’d be happy to work with you. The
code is open-source.

[>] Brian

2

I’ve been asked a number of times to make it cross-platform, and SDL
would cover the two necessary areas (OpenGL setup and Events.) I’ve
googled around and looked at the headers, and so far I’ve only seen
proposals for pbuffer support, which is something I need.

There’s some experimental pbuffer support in the 1.3 CVS branch (grep
for “RenderTarget”) but this will (hopefully) go away in favor of the
well-designed, cross-platform GL_EXT_framebuffer_object extension.

Pbuffers are ugly, and need SDL’s intervention to abstract the
platform-specific bits. FBOs use the same API on all platforms. If we’re
really lucky, we’ll never see an official SDL release with pbuffer support.

–ryan.