The OpenGL Architecture Review Board officially announced OpenGL 3 on August 8th 2007 at the Siggraph Birds of a Feather (BOF) in San Diego, CA. OpenGL 3 is the official name for what has previously been called OpenGL Longs Peak. OpenGL 3 is a true industry effort with broad support from all vendors in the ARB. The OpenGL 3 specification is on track to be finalized at the next face-to-face meeting of the OpenGL ARB, at the end of August. This means the specification can be publicly available as soon as the end of September, after the mandatory 30 day Khronos approval period has passed. Also presented were the changes to the OpenGL Shading Language that will accompany OpenGL 3. For more details check here, here and here.
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Member since:2005-07-06
I know of SDL, but since I'm not a games programmer I have no idea how it compares to other frameworks in terms of ease of use, performance and features. Hopefully someone can comment on whether or not it's as good or better than the popular proprietary alternatives. There has to be a reason why it hasn't hit it big among commercial developers.
Member since:2005-11-19
SDL is easier to use than DirectX. While doing 2d graphics it isn't as fast, but with release 1.3 that will be rerouted through OpenGL's rendering pipeline instead. In short, it fills in the holes left open between OpenGL and system APIs thus making OpenGL a viable competitor to DirectX.
The only limitation is that up-to-date OpenGL drivers from the graphics card manufacturers are necessary to get Windows to go higher than version 1.4 on Vista or 1.1 on XP and older.
Member since:
2006-01-03
SDL is what you want you are suggesting: www.libsdl.org
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."
Edited 2007-08-13 14:30