OpenGL Headline News
Carina cross-platform OpenGL API-based 3D Viewer adds support for X3D and VRML97
Category: Applications •
Sep 30, 2005
The goal of Carina is to create a portable, high quality viewer for 3D formats, as well as a plugin for web browsers. It uses the QT library, OpenGL API and Java. The new v20050927 adds Anchor, Avatar, PointLight, and SpotLight nodes, crease angles and texture coordinates in indexed face sets, as well as support for X3D classic and xml encodings. Carina uses XSL-T to convert between formats such as X3D XML and Classic encodings to xVRML. The application knows about the transformation and, with Java enabled, will load the file as if it had a native parser specifically for that format. This opens the door for future versions of Carina to allow end-users to add transformations, and for Carina to chain them together until a format is reached that it can load. (Collada anyone?) Downloads are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux (as source)
GLSL compiler front-end and GLSL validation tool updates with source
Category: Developers •
Sep 26, 2005
3Dlabs has released updated versions of the open source GLSL compiler front-end and GLSLvalidate. GLSLvalidate can be used to determine whether a shader conforms to the OpenGL Shading Language specification. Validating a shader with this tool ensures that it will be portable to all implementations that conform to the OpenGL Shading Language specification. Because the GLSL parser is built into this tool, GLSLvalidate can be used on systems even if they do not support OpenGL or the OpenGL Shading Language. Source code is available for both the compiler front-end and for GLSLvalidate
Shallows GPGPU library facilitates OpenGL API-related C/C++ coding
Category: Developers •
Sep 26, 2005
Shallows is an opensource (GPL) C++ library designed to make GPGPU programming easier and safer. The goal is to reduce the time spent on writing and debugging OpenGL API-related C/C++ code, so the developers of GPGPU applications can concentrate on implementing the algorithms instead. GPGPU applications are all about performance, the overhead by using shallows is therefore kept low. In contrast to Brook and Sh the Shallows library is familiar to an experienced OpenGL developers mental view of the GPU pipeline, while at the same time checking for errors and minimize the number of codelines necessary for common GPGPU tasks.
GPUflame OpenGL API-accelerated fractal flame renderer
Category: Applications •
Sep 26, 2005
GPUflame is a GPU-accelerated renderer for iterated function system fractals. It generates high quality images using the OpenGL API to accelerate the compuatation and high-dynamic range display. It is based on Scott Drave’s fractal flame algorithm (as used in the “Electric Sheep” screensaver).
Amanith v0.1.1 vector graphics frameworks adds 64-bit support and new OpenGL API animation example
Category: Developers •
Sep 26, 2005
Amanith Framework is a cross-platform (Linux, Win32, Mac OX X, FreeBSD, Linux and IRIX) open source C++ framework for 2D and 3D vector graphics. The new v0.1.1 adds support for 64bit (Linux and Windows), hierarchical animations and and example that shows how animations can be combined with realtime accelerated rich graphics, using the OpenGL API.
