pouët.net

which API is best for rotating a donut?

Real men code directly on the hardware. APIs are for fags.

coding is for fags. musicians get all the girls!

I'm just gonna assume you're continuously using that word as a colloquial synonym for "cigarette".

Yes, I use it as the butt of my jokes.

no, i tend to smoke homosexuals

software rendering is the best!

:)

which is why my wishlist contains some framebuffer like access for gl :)

i think SDL provides a framebuffer like thing using glreadpixels, not heard good things about the performance of that method though


scali: whilst i agree there are issue with gl compatibility, a newb isn't going to be targetting a wide range of platforms and these issues won't bite them on the ass or stop them getting going.. they often deeper down and beyond "hello triangle" and spinning cubes.

in short i don't believe these issues make gl unsuitable for beginners.

As I said, my problem was with textures not appearing. Which I think is pretty basic, and will affect beginners.
I wouldn't even be having this argument if I didn't think it had any actual merit.

directx will be dead in ~3 years anyway. better waste your time useful learning an API that will still be around at the point you feel you mastered it.

and frankly, this goes beyond opengl, but any software where the term 'open' somewhere comes along makes my skin crawl cos it is a guarantee for consensus-driven development where too many developers had to piss over the code before it made its way to the public.

while scali sounds like hes deep into the zealot zone, some of what he says is kindof fair actually.

it's a very unscientific survey but my impression over the years is that when i see people moaning about demos running on one vendor's card or one driver version but crashing on others, or having weird rendering bugs on some hardware but not others, or when ive had personal experience of those problems myself, the majority of the offending cases are running on opengl.
while there are various possible reasons for that (more demos made on opengl? opengl coders more likely to be lamers / "academics", d3d coders more likely to be gamedev / console pros?), it does given an overall impression that there's still major compatibility problems out there - not just between gles devices, but on everyday commplace pc targets.
if you make each and every vendor ship, say, their own shader compiler front end, you get problems. even if there is a well-defined spec and a test suite.

relative beginners putting out their first releases are the least likely to be equipped with the experience to deal with those kinds of problems when they come up.

Far from it, in fact, I actually linked to my own BSD-licensed OpenGL code. But just because I use and support OpenGL doesn't mean I can't have criticism about it.



Exactly. Which is why I brought up the Gallium3D project, which takes a leaf out of D3D's book in that respect, and tries to solve such problems by having a common runtime. But it doesn't really work if organizations such as Khronos aren't behind it.

You can try to call that zealotry, but then you're just missing the point. This is not about "API X is better than API Y". Oh please. People who think that, REALLY don't know where I'm coming from. If anything, I'm an Amiga-guy, and PCs never interested me much, it's strictly professional. The only thing I enjoy on PCs is doing oldskool software rendering and hardware trickery, banging those EGA/VGA registers directly.

The point is just that both D3D and OGL have their strong and weak points. Try to put your hatred against Microsoft/D3D aside, and see the things that Microsoft is actually doing right. The OpenGL-world could learn a thing or two from Microsoft (and probably vice versa, although within the scope of a beginner, I can't really think of an example at this point).



My point exactly.