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OpenGL 3.2
Saturday, August 8, 2009 | Permalink

Having been on vacation I'm a bit late to the party, but OpenGL 3.2 has been released and the specs are available here.

I like the progress OpenGL has made lately and it looks like the API is fully recovering from the years where it was falling behind. If Khronos can keep up this pace OpenGL will remain a relevant API. I hope the people behind GLEW and GLEE get up to speed though because neither have implemented OpenGL 3.1 yet. In the past I rolled my own extension loading code, but was hoping to not have to do that and use libraries like the above. Looks like I might have to do my own in the future as well just to be able to use the latest and greatest.

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kai
Sunday, August 9, 2009

have you considered contributing to glew or glee instead of doing your own library in the future? i mean that's the reason why they have been released as open source.

Jan
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Well, it is more than an hour of work, but i did write an immediate mode emulation library for GL3.

It's open source (including commercial use), you can get it here:

http://www.artifactgames.de/glim

I agree with the decision to drop display lists and immediate mode, both have made drivers horribly complicated to implement.

I still think GL 3.0 was the worst thing to do, they should have created a completely new API. However, given that we have GL 3.0 as a basis, 3.1 and 3.2 have been very good steps forward. Not yet comparable with D3D10 or 11, though.

Jan.

Kyle
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Imo removal of immediate mode is silly. Yes its not the way gfx works, but its easy and handy.

What khronos should do here (imo) is creation of standard utility layer on top of core GL where immediate mode could sit (together with some other usefull things). Its a pity that it wont happen as they doesnt seem to have founds to do that.

Thats also a reason i think we will never see major overhaul of api (like lets say dsa, and other changes to object management) - khronos is too weak to preasure gfx vendors effectively

Eosie
Monday, August 10, 2009

Keep in mind that Khronos "is" just a bunch of vendors.

Eosie
Monday, August 10, 2009

BTW, you all seem to want updated GLEW. You can do it yourself, partially. It's simple:

- get a working linux machine somehow
- use Subversion to "checkout" glew/trunk
- go to that directory and type "make extensions", which generates the entire GLEW source code from the OpenGL registry including all recent extensions

You can do that everytime a new extension appears in the registry. (Maybe someone could write a blog post about this? )

App
Monday, August 10, 2009

Immediate mode is no longer useful for moderm gfx applications.

If you need immediate mode for learning purpose, why don't just use old OpenGL instead?
You can still use old version of OpenGL. Upgrade is not enforced.

Sopyer
Monday, August 10, 2009

@Jan I doubt that display lists and immediate mode is making drivers overcomplicated. They just should separate actuall low-level HW driver and OpenGL implementation. Example of Mesa3D and linux graphical stack is the best proof.
@App to suggest that immediate mode is no longer usefull is just very short-sight. Try to implement deffered renderig, postprocess, UI or something else and you WILL implement some form of immediate mode, just using dynamic VB/IB, especially for quad rendering. Why remove functionality that is useful to many people?

Kyle
Monday, August 10, 2009

Other strange move is removal of display lists. Yes they have their problems, but their removal was a bit hasty in my opinion. Just look at DX state objects ... seem kinda similar to me (id even say that this one is OGL inspired, but i dont know DX very well so i wont).
I wonder how long will it take for display list to come back (in some form)

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