Monthly Archives: June 2007

OpenGL Longs Peak. Sooo Loong!

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I am an avid follower of OpenGL news as it was the first graphics API (other being Direct3D) I ever picked up. So I must confess I have a little bit of a soft corner when it comes to OpenGL. I thoroughly dislike comparing the two APIs because I consider them equivalent in functionality. However, recent developments in DirectX have put it at a clear advantage as compared to OpenGL. Direct3D implementations (DirectX 10) already support SM 4 with cards like the 8800 (Geforce 8800 GTS from NVIDIA) already hitting the market. That in itself shows how far behind OpenGL is. I have been hearing Longs Peak for too long and either the ARB committee is sleeping or just too lazy off their a** to get anything done. Either way OpenGL has a lot of catching up to do, which is a pity since OpenGL was better designed initially.

The longs peak update does promise a few changes and improvements. For example the buffer objects finally have the necessary improvements like

  • mapping only a specified range of a buffer
  • strict write-only access
  • explicit flushing of altered/written regions
  • whole-buffer invalidation
  • partial-buffer invalidation
  • non-serialized access

most of which are a part of Direct3D implementation already and are available in Direct3D 9.0. These should have been done a long time back.

Longs peak has also introduced an object model. No its not a direct OO approach, but something of an OO approach wrapped inside an C API. While OpenGL can’t be convented directly into an Objec-Oriented library, the committee came to a conclusion that it was impossible to move further without having to work on some kind of object model. I can understand their concerns, but the object model thing looks kinda overly complicated. Whist the exact implementation details will only be known when longs peak is released and the drivers come out, we have to hope that we are not in for a any nasty surprises.

Thats not to say everything is bad. I mean, in the end this may just look like a rant in a couple of months, maybe the spec is really good. I just hope they release the spec soon.

Screen-shots are now reposted.

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Sample screen-shotThe screen shots that had disappeared have now reappeared, i.e. I had to repost them on the site. The site is now at near 99% operational. Check out the screen-shots section for more images.

New website and new blog.

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As you can guess from my earlier post, my old website was taken down rather mysteriously and I am not too happy about it. But there is nothing much I can do except mull over my loss. Anyways, things have to move on and so, this will be my new site from now on. There is one more change I have made, I am now blogging on wordpress instead of b2evolution. The switch is intentional, and I am already pretty happy about it. Most of my dev articles are still on the b2evolution database, which I plan to slowly by surely move to wordpress.

As far as the main site goes, it will be the cms site. There is no change to that. The site is not 100% up as yet. Some sections like the screen-shots are being worked on as I write this. But I don’t see any major problems over there. I am pretty happy with Joomla cms, so nothing changes on that front. I will continue a similar method of posting updates regarding game development (for those who have no clue, I am currently developing a 3D cartoon game called Doofus3D, and I blog all development) here as well as on the main page. I hope to finish migration of the site by tomorrow evening, since I am a little caught up in last week’s beta release.

Unlike the previous site however, I wont be having too many categories. I want to keep the ruckus to a minimum. Things like road-maps and progress will now on be under “Development” category. Anything specific about the O2 engine will come under “O2 Engine”. The one thing I miss however is the ability to categorize links. But I think I can always use my main site for that purpose. Joomla provides a much better links module and that should be the logical place where the links should be.

I just hope this site stays up longer than the previous. Keeping my fingers crossed.