Disclaimer

People reading the OpenGL ARB minutes are cautioned that statements made by attendees do not represent official company positions unless explicitly identified as such.

Action Items / Conclusions from the Meeting

• Create marketing/general technical working groups
• Some 1.5 spec changes agreed
• NVIDIA and Sun renewed as Auxiliary Members
• Adopted new syntax rules document and naming guidelines, along with aliases to fix inconsistencies in extensions folded into OpenGL 1.5.
• Detailed review and discussion of ongoing efforts in bylaws and super buffers working groups, both of which are still in progress.

Summary of Discussion Topics

• OpenGL future prospects
• OpenGL 1.5 Spec Review
• Super Buffers Status
• New / Renewed Members
• Extending the OpenGL Shading Language
• Revised Syntax Document
• Bylaws Working Group Update
• Revised Syntax Document (cont.)
• More OpenGL 1.5 Spec Review
• More Super Buffers Review
• Next Meeting

Tuesday, September 9

OpenGL future prospects

Nick is concerned about slow atrophy of OpenGL developers / apps to DX. We're missing someone to engage developers, determine demand for new features, find out what they've used that's successful and not, etc. Can we pool money and do e.g. developer events, compatibility testing, etc.? Related comments from Apple, SGI, ATI, 3Dlabs, Allan.

MS makes DX easy to install, standardized, big hooplah, events like Meltdown, developer mailing list. opengl.org forums may fill this role but Nick thinks professional ISVs don't post there.

Old Chris Hecker survey could provide useful guidelines.

Cass thinks the ARB is a good standards body, but not a good developer support group.

Should focus be on game developers or on "professional" ISVs? Both. New games (not just Quake-engine based) are coming using OpenGL. Probably needs a different focus for the two groups.

MS has lots of good developer tools - few widely available for OpenGL (Apple profiler, for example). Needs to be really easy for people to install and use. Integration of video is hard in Windows.

Should send out email to the participants' list suggesting forming two working groups, one for entertainment and one for pro apps.

Is SDL an adequate basis for media integration?

Khronos has an OpenGL ES marketing group, and is getting some media attention - hasn't gone to an ISV conference yet. They actually pay a full-time group manager to organize outreach.

Generally agreed we should form a working group, but not as clear on what the charter of the WG would be.

Examples of people migrating OpenGL->DX: Valve (Half-Life), Discreet (3D Studio Max, but not other development groups).

Cross-platform apps often are developed initially in DX, then a porting company is hired to produce an OpenGL / MacOSX version. Apple has had some problems with companies using a D3D->OpenGL shim.

Nick has a list of proposed agenda items for marketing & technical WGs.

Mktg WG:

• Developer outreach: issues/needs
• Can we say something to reassure people worried about future Windows platform support?
• Developer conferences / events
• Changes they'd propose to opengl.org (also for tech. WG)
• Talking to console / set-top vendors about adopting OpenGL and participating
• Getting OpenGL into benchmarks

Tech WG:

• Update GLU / GLUT?
• Can we pull together utilities built by different groups?
• Determine important classes of features - memory management? Video? Cursors?
• Stability issues
• Address developer discomfort with extensions
• Full OpenGL SDK

We agreed to use the second split (marketing/technical) rather the the first (entertainment/professional). Nick will find someone in NVIDIA to lead the mktg WG. Jon will lead tech. WG

Neil thinks that cross-platform and backwards compatibility are OpenGL strengths where the marketing message on Windows should focus. Biggest long-term danger is perception that OpenGL is threatened on Windows. Khronos would welcome coordinating marketing efforts with the ARB. Marketing efforts tend to fall at the first hurdle: no budget, because there's no money in the ARB. Bylaws WG should deal with this.

OpenGL 1.5 Spec Review

Updated spec draft review. Numerous small edits proposed (some of these need to be reflected back in the extension specs from which features were folded in, too). Will circulate new draft post-meeting with all proposed changes + other changes proposed online.

Super Buffers Status

Status: no outstanding functional issues, some minor areas not filled in yet - error conditions, minimum functionality, etc.

ATI is working on a classic spec document form of the extension. It's not yet ready for review, will be sent out once it's clean. Rob wants people to review the spec as a unit, rather than in pieces. Hopefully within 2-3 weeks.

Rob walked us through the current spec (draft 0.26) in detail. One area to be filled in: the set of memory object creation requests that must succeed (in section 3.1.1).

New / Renewed Members

NVIDIA and Sun were renewed as Auxiliary Members for another year, by vote of the Permanent Members.

Wednesday, September 10

Extending the OpenGL Shading Language

In the working group, we pulled out several features - texture rectangle fetches and draw buffers. How do we extend the language? Suggestions: for function names, ala C++ (ATI::<name>). For variables and tokens, continue to use postfix (FOO_ATI) convention. Alternatively, just use postfix convention everywhere. Will continue discussing in working groups.

Revised Syntax Document

Kurt looked at all the core and ARB entry points / tokens and found some inconsistencies. How to progress? Patching extensions raises backwards compatibility problem. Could instead fold these changes into 1.5 and look at propagating back into ARB extensions later.

Bylaws Working Group Update

(See Dave's WG notes for more details)

Status report & updates. SGI is turning some of the plaintext proposals into legal language.

Considerable disagreement over whether to do all revisions as a single package, or split into orthogonal issues (membership levels, IP policy, etc.)

Considerable disagreement, and long discussion on desirability, scope, and terms of a possible waiver applying to open source implementations.

Noted that we all should sign the IP waiver described in section 7.3 of the current bylaws for OpenGL 1.5. Doug and Scott will draft language.

General agreement that when a member brings a contribution forward, they should disclose terms, but not be required (though strongly encouraged) to use the default license.

Revised Syntax Document (cont.)

Kurt updated document per earlier discussion.

• Voted YES to Kurt's proposed naming/syntax.rules changes for OpenGL 1.5.
• Want to move syntax.rules to an appendix of the spec.
• In extension template, add "changes to syntax rules" section & reorder state tables to match spec.
• In working group guidelines, ask WG to review extension spec vs. syntax.rules before finalizing.

More OpenGL 1.5 Spec Review

Backwards compatibility change on p. 129: convolution language said it was applied to GetTexImage in some cases. This was a typo and has never been true; dropped from spec.

Need to describe NULL in section 2.1 (or perhaps just use '0' as a pointer value). This has potential effects on non-C language bindings.

More Super Buffers Review

Spent remainder of the meeting time on continuing detailed spec review, until people needed to leave. May reserve one of the WG's weekly telecons for interested people outside the WG, to finish review.

Next Meeting

Sun will host the December 9-10 ARB meeting in Silicon Valley.

Thanks to Dell for hosting this meeting!