Thanks, was Re: OpenGL reality check

SDL Development
1

those performance tests are really interesting, :wink:

ā€œJohn Siliconā€ wrote in message
news:43A2C2CF.6050108 at earthlink.netā€¦> Bob Pendleton wrote:

I want to thank everyone for the thoughtful answers to my questions. I
am aware of Crystalspace, Irrlicht, and Ogre, and I think they are all
fine systems. What I wish we had was a 3D api that is as simple to use
as the the SDL 2D api that was layered on top of OpenGL, DirectX, and
what ever other native graphics api exist so that it was as easy to
cross platform 3D on SDL as it is t do cross platform 2D. I havenā€™t seen
anything like that. Iā€™m not even sure such a thing is possible.

Bob Pendleton

To be completely honest, Iā€™ve been working for almost a year on this sort
of thing, but its probably not going to be useful to you for two reasons:

  • Development on the original C++ code has been completely halted. The
    team has a new technology direction, .NET (choice made due to it making
    our lives easier, and due to some interesting performance tests we did
    early on that showed that not using our own, error-prone custom garbage
    collection, and the JIT compilation of code, would actually increase
    performance. Also, a nice type-safe environment means a lot of the bugs
    that were creeping in from the newer programmers are avoided completely).
  • The original C++ code is still under a proprietary license at the
    moment. There is a glimmer of hope that it will be eventually released
    until the LGPL, but at the current time, it is infeasible to do so.

For non-commercial cross-platform development, such as open-source or
academic, it is probably not worth the effort involved in creating such a
thing ā€“ OpenGL preforms quite well on all current systems, if you have
proper drivers for it. Even the default Windows driver and Mesa drivers
will work well enough for most purposes. Plus, there is the added
down-side that it adds more required pieces of testing (You already need
to test Windows/Linux with OpenGL, but what about Windows/Wine [you should
never expect somebody to not use Wine just because you have a Linux
version!] with DirectX?)

(On a side note, both the C++ and C# versions use SDL [the C# uses the
SdlDotNet {slightly modified, will be sending patches to the maintainer
once we finish mucking with it} and Tao wrappers] to create its OpenGL
context, or as its display surface for the software renderer)