glut vs. Win32 vs. MFC

[Rob]

I have some experience with openGL under glut, MFC, and vanilla Win32 and I was wondering if anyone had strong opinions about the pro's and con's of the different approaches to windowing.

I am about to start a fairly large OpenGL project which will entail doing some interactive virtual worlds sort of stuff with lots of wacky, off-the-beaten-path input/output devices.

[Rob]

Oh yeah, I guess I should add that my application will probably spend most or all of its time in a full-screen mode, which means I'm not needing to use any Windows GUI widgets.
I'm kind of leaning towards glut, but I thought I'd see if anyone had compelling arguments to the contrary.

[MikeC]

I wouldn't bother with MFC in this case; it doesn't gain you anything and it creates a hell of a mess.

GLUT is pretty good in most respects, but a couple of points to bear in mind:

1) Although you can run fullscreen in glut 3.7, you can't actually change screenmode (i.e. resolution or colour depth).

2) glut's support for input controllers is a bit limited (only recognizes 2 joystick axes, and I think buttons are quite limited as well). You may be able to use input device APIs alongside glut though - anybody tried this?

3) You can't get at the message pump. Some performance impact, but not a huge one.

If these are OK, go with glut. Otherwise, you're probably better off with vanilla Win32.

[AndersO]

Totally agree with MikeC except on 1. You can change resolution with GLUT 3.7. Although I haven't found any docs on it, but after looking in the source... try this:

void glutGameModeString(const char *string);
int glutEnterGameMode(void);
void glutLeaveGameMode(void);

The format for the mode string, for example:
"800x600:16@60"

Instead of glutCreateWindow you call glutEnterGameMode, but before that you should ofcourse specify resolution with glutGameModeString. At exit call glutLeaveGameMode.

Well, thats it. Although I had have little success with this on voodoo cards it works on all other cards I tested.

The only documentation I found on this is the man pages that comes with the source and source itself, doh.

Cheers

[dmy]

about mode changing, when i was using glut i usually set the new screen reolution with a call to ChangeDisplaySettings() BEFORE calling the first glut function (glutInit() or something like that)

however, i've found no way to freerly make it change when the application was running...

Dolo/\/\ighty

[frederic]

You can check the asteroid demo in the Glut distribution for an example of GlutGameMode.