BeBits > TableOfContents > DeveloperArea > Libraries
Excerpt from the OpenGL website:
OpenGL is the premier environment for developing portable, interactive 2D and 3D graphics applications. Since its introduction in 1992, OpenGL has become the industry's most widely used and supported 2D and 3D graphics application programming interface (API), bringing thousands of applications to a wide variety of computer platforms. OpenGL fosters innovation and speeds application development by incorporating a broad set of rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. Developers can leverage the power of OpenGL across all popular desktop and workstation platforms, ensuring wide application deployment.
A number of cards have support for OpenGL and new games are being developed in OpenGL. As it has been said before, BeOS has had OpenGL support in the past and was intended to also have hardware OpenGL support in R5. It didn't happen though. Due to this failure, at least one major game (Neverwinter Nights) has canceled its plans to create a BeOS version.
I believe it is fair to assume that we will supply OpenGL support in order to be a viable gaming platform. What parts of OpenGL though? It's nice to aim for all of it, but perhaps we should make some priorities.
Note: in order to claim compliance, it is necessary to implement the entire API.
License notes: for open source implementations of opengl on open source platforms, there is no licensing fee. woo hoo!
Mesa6.2 was released not too long ago, it compiles and runs under beos, and it is conformant to 1.5 specs, which is the latest. This library still needs some maintenance work.
Related:
3D Graphics
2D Graphics
- Amanith Framework - crossplatform opensource C++ framework for manipulate vector graphics is currently looking for help from BeOS developers.
- GLUT
- TinyPTC
- SDL
OpenAL
Games | Solitaire | Quake | Billard GL etc.
3D somewhat-blog - nVidia 3D accelerant driver etc...
BeEmulated - game console emulation
OpenGL Documentation:
