Re: OpenGL scenegraph

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Jan Ekholm wrote:
> 
> Sounds interesting. :-) But my humble effort is still to a large extent
> not thoroughly tested nor fully implemented. One good thing I think can be
> worth mentioning is that it does not force anybody to use any kind of
> toolkit, it works everywhere where there's a window which would accept
> plain OpenGL, e.g. glut, the Qt QGL widget and probably the Gtk equivalent
> (name?), as well as the Motif GLRenderArea.

Although some PLIB components rely on GLUT, SSG does not.  You can use
SSG with any OpenGL toolkit.

> Multiple packages are IMHO a good thing. Evolution will most likely let
> the best and strongest survive (although not in Kansas).

...where The Lord Gates created all software in His Image in one
single act of Creation...  :-)

> Btw Steve, thanks for the nice docs on OpenGL you have on your site. I've
> been reading a couple of them while trying to figure out how to properly
> combine several rotations into one single rotation in order to avoid some
> weird effects. Still struggling, so I had to write a Matrix class to try
> out the theories in practise... :-)

Matrices give people the hardest time.  The problem is that some people
like to think in abstract numbers and others prefer to see 'pictures' of
what's going on in their heads.   I'm definitely a visual thinker and
I had the hardest time with matrices since all the books and teachers
make them out to be black boxes containing 16 numbers. When I realised
that you can think of matrices in that highly visual way, it was like
a bolt of lightning.  So - I had to share that vision.

I get thanks from more people about that couple of pages of writing
than for all the other FAQ's and freeware I've written put together.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1@airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker@hti.com      (work)