OpenGL+GLUT the future

[Paul Matthews <paulmatthews@yahoo.com>]

I'm not going to make any friends with this post ... but the though
struck me with such force last night I just had to share it.

1) I'm teaching myself OpenGL and GLUT programming by looking at
examples. What struck me as interesting was that I could download
examples which where written for the Silicon Graphics machines, or for
NT, and get them to running under Linux by only changing the Makefile.

2) OpenGL was a bit of an oddity at first, why is a supposed "just
above the hardware api" so high level? Why does it have display lists
and geometry management and motion blur support? I then relised that
on the high end SGI cards geometry management, display lists and
motion blur are all in the hardware. Todays high end SGI hardware is
tomorrows Voodoo 4.

The obvious conclusion of these two trains of thoughts is that the
best way games development, and playing, on Linux can progress is by
improving Mesa and by expanding GLUT.

GLUT 3.7 already handles joysticks, spaceballs and the keyboards in a
platform independant manner, why not add platform independant sound
support to GLUT (PenguinSound)?

PenguinGUI can be a layer over GLUT the same way MUI is in GLUT already.

And Brian Paul could certainly do with a hand making Mesa faster...

Imagine a future where any game can be ported trivially to any platform.

Now I just go and hide over here ...

--
Paul Matthews
==
--
Paul Matthews
nudge@samba.anu.edu.au


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