Superscape On Making 3D-Accelerated Mobile Games
Categories: Applications | Processors |
Jun 28, 2007
David Britten, vice president of technology at mobile developer/publisher Superscape, pointed out in his case study of the company’s development of a 3D-accelerated version of its Ducati 3D Extreme game, the consistency of hardware remains a problem. Some devices still don’t support OpenGL ES, while other cause problems because hardware manufacturers don’t always ship product with standardized firmware. The 3D-accelerated version of Ducati 3D Extreme was written using the OpenGL ES Common Lite v1.0 API, the game work was split with the CPU dealing with the gameplay logic, the DSP4 running the geometry, lighting and audio, while the dedicated 3D hardware did the rasterizing and Z buffering.
Mesa 7.0 with OpenGL 2.1 support released
Categories: Developers |
Jun 28, 2007
Mesa is a free and open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. The project has just released a new stable version of Mesa 7.0 which is featuring OpenGL 2.1 API support. A number of bugs have also been fixed since the 6.5.3 release.
OpensceneGraph-2.0 released
Categories: Developers |
Jun 28, 2007
OpenSceneGraph-2.0 release introduces a new multi-threaded, multi-gpu viewer library which integrate with a wide range of windowing toolkits, a new shadow library, a new interactive manipulator library and new threading models that make the most of modern multi-core CPUs. The latest release also includes and wide range of feature and performance enhancements including updates to COLLADA and OpenFlight support. OpenSceneGraph-2.0 supports OpenGL 1.1 through to OpenGL 2.1, including OpenGL Shader Language and Vertex/Pixel/FrameBufferOjbects, and runs on Windows, Linux, OSX, Solaris, IRIX, HP-Ux, AIX and FreeBSD.
SPARC(R) OpenGL(R) Support on ATI Radeon(TM) 9250 Released by Xi Graphics
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 27, 2007
Xi Graphics, Inc. announced that its extensive Accelerated-X(TM) Summit Series product line of X Window System (“X”) graphics sub-system software packages now has 2D and OpenGL 3D support for the ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card on SPARC computer platforms from Sun Microsystems. The new Xi Graphics X server/driver offering is high-performance, high-quality commercial software that is compliant with industry standard specifications for X (through X11R6.5) and for OpenGL (through v1.5).
Tutorial from dmedia: Text Rendering with OpenGL
Categories: Developers |
Jun 27, 2007
This tutorial focuses on fairly advanced text rendering. If you’d like to add some text to your OpenGL applications, this is just the right place to be. If you’re using Direct3D, PixelToaster, SDL or whatever else, don’t leave too soon - the techniques presented here may as well work with other pixel plotting libraries. You only need some basic blending and texturing. Some people might think that text rendering is trivial, but in this tutorial we’re going to see that in order to support a nice set of features, such as Unicode compliance, antialiasing or kerning, we’re going to need more than just a bit of coding. Check out the tutorial now.
How to get Autodesk Revit models into Acrobat 3D version 8
Categories: General |
Jun 26, 2007
Tim Huff from Adobe Inc has a great blog entry on how easy it is to get Autodesk Revit models into Acrobat 3D version 8. This will be done using a cool new technology to Acrobat 3D, OpenGL Capture. In Acrobat 3D version 7, it was a bit of a challenge to get your full Revit Models into it. In version Acrobat 8 we updated the Capture Routines to work better with Revit’s graphic sub system. To find out what this all means to you, we highly suggest you take a quick trip to Tim’s great blog entry and have a read. You’ll be happy you did.
Big Nerd Ranch Europe announced the first offering of Rocco Bowling’s five-day OpenGL Bootcamp
Categories: General | Developers |
Jun 25, 2007
Big Nerd Ranch Europe announced today the first offering of Rocco Bowling’s five-day OpenGL Bootcamp at the old monastery Kloster Eberbach near Frankfurt, Germany, for September 10-14, 2007. In modern application development OpenGL has become the standard-bearer in the visualization of 2D and 3D images in a wide spectrum of fields, from visually enhanced user experiences in general, to medical research and pharmaceuticals, rich data visualization, in addition to video gaming. Today, everyone doing any work concerning graphics must know OpenGL. Through the vision and dedication of the OpenGL community and the OpenGL ARB, OpenGL excels in cross-platform portability and scalability, adaptable to a variety of hardware environments from individual workstations to supercomputers. For more information, see the Khronos website here.
Doomsday 1.9.0-beta6 to support only OpenGL
Categories: General |
Jun 25, 2007
The Doomsday Engine Development blog has announced it will drop support for Direct3D. Doomsday 1.9.0-beta6 will see support for Direct3D dropped. For architectural reasons, development on the rendering plugins (drOpenGL and drD3D) has proved quite troublesome, not just the fact that whatever was implemented in one had to be done to the other (typically first in OpenGL and later in Direct3D). On our modern systems, there is very little to pick and choose between OpenGL and Direct3D and both have very good vender support (not like the early days of hardware acceleration when typically one of which your card/drivers just didn’t ‘like’). Given that OpenGL is cross-platform (and the API is nicer IMO) it is the obvious choice to continue development with.
DIRECTX 10 is bad for gamers
Categories: General |
Jun 25, 2007
Dustin Sklavos at Notebookreview.com has written an interesting perspective on Gaming and DirectX vs OpenGL.
Excerpt: “DirectX 10 hasn’t lived up to any of its promises, and in fact has been a titanic disappointment. More than that, the features that are supposed to be unique to DirectX 10 can also be exposed in OpenGL. Given how few people readily jumped on the Vista bandwagon, it’s safe to suggest there might be a slight paradigm shift to favoring OpenGL, especially now that DirectX has had its components largely broken up.
A rejuvenated interest in Mac gaming more than likely means rejuvenated interest in OpenGL, which is NOT platform dependent as DirectX 10 is. A rejuvenated interest in OpenGL means the potential for DX10 features outside of Windows XP. In short, DX10 is, at least at the moment, bust, and the features it boasts so proudly may indeed wind up making the journey back to Windows XP in the form of updates to OpenGL.”
Plunger version 0.1.0 just released offers COLLADA support
Categories: Developers |
Jun 22, 2007
Plunger version 0.1.0 has been released and is available from the WorldForge download site. Plunger is a 3D mesh converter. It currently imports Collada, OgreXML and Sear’s object format and exports Collada, OgreXML, Sear’s object format, MD3 and a text summary about the model. Plunger is written in Python.
Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars an OpenGL API based third-person action game released
Categories: Applications |
Jun 21, 2007
Call for Heroes: Pompolic Wars is a third-person action game with RPG elements placed in a fantasy-medieval world. It uses OpenGL API based 3D engine with full support for vertex and fragment programs, GLSL, VBO, render targets and more. It offers fully customizable and scriptable shader development with the Lua programming language. Available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista.
Visage Technologies character animation SDK now more accessible
Categories: Applications |
Jun 21, 2007
Visage Technologies AB adopts a new licensing policy for its powerful visage|SDK real-time character animation software development kit. The major motivation for the new policy is to make sophisticated real-time character animation more accessible for a large population of interested developers. Full body characters with skinning and facial animation controlled through standard MPEG-4 Face and Body Animation Parameters are now available in extremely competitively priced visage|SDK BASE package, with other packages providing higher level functions such as lip sync and animation driven by speech synthesis. Find out more and try out the OpenGL powered demo here.
OpenGL Pipeline Newsletter Vol 4 covers Long Peak, shaders, debugging and more
Categories: General |
Jun 20, 2007
The fourth edition of OpenGL Pipeline--the quarterly newsletter covering all things the OpenGL standards body has “in the pipeline”--covers a bunch of exciting news and tips: from updates about OpenGL “Longs Peak” to mobile shaders and debugging.
Topics in this issue include:
- Climbing OpenGL Longs Peak, Camp 3: An OpenGL ARB Progress Update
- Shaders Go Mobile: Announcing OpenGL ES 2.0
- Longs Peak Update: Buffer Object Improvements
- Another Object Lesson
- Transforming OpenGL Debugging to a "White Box" Model
Ron Avitzur talks about his adventures in Optimization: OpenGL
Categories: Developers |
Jun 19, 2007
Ron Avitzur spent the last several weeks experimenting, instrumenting his code, profiling performance, and optimizing. Ron presents by way of summary, a sequence of timing and Shark profiles at various stages examining animated graphs of two implicit equations which represent different balances between numeric calculations and rendering complexity.
Clutter now includes OpenGL ES support
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 19, 2007
Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich graphical user interfaces. Clutter has many many new features now including OpenGL ES support. Clutter uses OpenGL (and soon optionally OpenGL ES) for rendering but with an API which hides the underlying GL complexity from the developer. The Clutter API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible.
Ambrose3D is a simple but useful 3D engine based on OpenGL and SDL
Categories: Developers |
Jun 18, 2007
Ambrose3D is a simple, but useful 3d-engine in C/C++ based on OpenGL and SDL. It does not include too many buzzword features, but it’s complete enough to be useful starting point for all kinds of interesting things you can do with 3d hardware. Being a “bare bones” engine it is possible for a mere mortal to understand everything about the engine. Ambrose3D is free for anyone to use, extend, and learn from, and this is what it was designed for. The source code is licensed under the very liberal zlib/libpng license; the exporter is gpl.
ALT Software and aicas Partner to Extend JamaicaVM with OpenGL Display Capabilities
Categories: Developers | Applications |
Jun 18, 2007
ALT Software, a worldwide supplier of DO-178B certifiable 2D/3D graphics solutions and development services announced today that it has teamed with aicas, a leader in Java technology for safety critical realtime applications, to provide integrated OpenGL drivers for use with aicas’ Java Virtual Machine for object-oriented software development. This collaboration will yield the most flexible, deterministic, optimally performing display software for the aerospace & defense, avionics, automotive/telematics, industrial, consumer, and medical embedded markets.
OpenSceneGraph Reference Manual v1.2 is now available
Categories: Developers |
Jun 15, 2007
Blue Newt Software LLC and Skew Matrix Software LLC have joined forces to produce documentation and provide developer training for OpenSceneGraph, the cross platform open source OpenGL-based scene graph API. The OpenSceneGraph Reference Manual v1.2 is now available, and registration is open for developer training in September.
Elements Interactive B.V. announces mobile game engine EDGELIB SDK version 3.10
Categories: Developers |
Jun 15, 2007
Elements Interactive B.V. announces the release of mobile game engine EDGELIB SDK version 3.10 featuring a renewed framework, support for windowed applications and more. EDGELIB offers an device independent API for high-performance 2D graphics, hardware accelerated 3D graphics using OpenGL ES, software 3D rendering, file access, input, network connectivity and much, much more!
NVIDIA announces FX Composer 2.0 Beta 3 with COLLADA and OpenGL support
Categories: Applications |
Jun 15, 2007
NVIDIA announces FX Composer 2.0 Beta 3. FX Composer 2 is a powerful integrated development environment for shader authoring. With support for DirectX and OpenGL, HLSL, COLLADA FX, and CgFX, as well as .fbx, .x, .3ds, .obj, and .dae formats, FX Composer provides true cross-platform API functionality.
DAZ 3D, Inc announces Bryce 5.5 is now free and has OpenGL support
Categories: Applications |
Jun 15, 2007
DAZ 3D, Inc. a technology leader in 3D content and software, announced today the immediate availability of the 3D environment and animation software Bryce® 5.5 for free via Download.com, a popular software site. Upgraded features include OpenGL support, an improved terrain editor, improved network-rendering with Bryce Lightning 2.0, and over 50% render speed increase.
Congratulations Blizzard on your Best Game award at WWDC07
Categories: General |
Jun 13, 2007
Congratulations go to Blizzard from OpenGL on your Best Game award at WWDC07. Blizzard has kept Mac gaming alive through the difficult years and are now driving the development of OpenGL, not only on Mac OS X by constantly pushing the stack to its limits and helping us improve OpenGL, but also by actively participating in the OpenGL ARB.
Trolltech Qt 4.3 released
Categories: Developers | Applications |
Jun 13, 2007
Just in time for summer, the people from Trolltech have released a new version of their framework for cross-platform GUI programming. Qt sets the standard for high-performance, cross-platform application development. It includes a C++ class library and tools for cross-platform development and internationalization. Qt 4.3 boasts ‘much improved OpenGL support and integration of QtScript (based on ECMAScript 3, like JavaScript 1.5)’. Visit the Click here for more information on Qt from the Trolltech site.
OpenGL updated in Apple’s latest OS X
Categories: Developers |
Jun 13, 2007
OpenGL has been updated to a newer version in Apple’s latest Beta of OS X 10.5, otherwise known as Leopard. Higher performance (a LLVM is used to improve vertex performance) and a newer version of OpenGL will help further Apple’s push towards graphical bliss. This should also help game developers by providing them with an easy way to access all the advanced features of today’s graphics cards. What this means for users: better performance 2D/3D, and (possibly) more advanced games.
Danger from the Deep 0.3, now with GLSL shaders
Categories: Applications |
Jun 13, 2007
Danger from the Deep, a free Open Source World War II German submarine simulator, is now in its 0.3 incarnation. The program and source code is available under the GPL license and most of the artwork/data is released under a Creative Commons license. Dftd is currently being developed on x86-32/64 Linux and Windows, and there are packages for intel OSX and ppc64 OSX as well. This latest release replaced all shaders by GLSL shaders, per pixel reflections, multi-threading, as well as using VBOs and FBOs, and a horde of new effects, courtesy of GLSL, amongst other major new features. Besides the usual ports, it’s reported to work on IA64 and Sparc64 FreeBSD as well as Sparc64 Linux, but since the code is portable, there shouldn’t be any problems porting to other architectures.
Tungsten enhanced Chromium enables parallel OpenGL graphics rendering
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 13, 2007
Tungsten Graphics on Wednesday announced plans to produce a version of its TG Enhanced Chromium software to run on Intel-based Macs. Tungsten Graphics anticipates releasing it by the end of August, 2007. Chromium is an open source project that enables clustered computing groups to do parallel OpenGL graphics rendering. TG Enhanced Chromium is Tungsten Graphics’ own version, with some of its own additions to the code. With TG Enhanced Chromium, Intel Mac-based workgroups will be able to drive multi-panel displays for scientific visualization applications — a “graphics wall,” as it were.
Vatan Engine SDK
Categories: General | Developers |
Jun 13, 2007
The Vatan engine is a powerful and high-performance 3D OpenGL Game engine for rendering, sound and physics. The Vatan engine also features an ingame Editor, VEdit that allows designers to manipulate everything in the scenery, from grass, to fog, sun position, sky settings(cloud densitys,wind) ,bloom settings, water reflection\refraction, foams, buildings, paint textures in the terrain, modify heightmap, setting up and configure the AI , etc. It’s possible to switch between the editor and the game, and test the gameplay immediatly with the press of a key. Game logic can be done using Lua Scripts to access the game engine core.
John Carmack of Id Software opts for OpenGL over DirectX
Categories: Developers |
Jun 12, 2007
John Carmack of Id Software made a surprise appearance at Apple WWDC07 during Steve Jobs keynote speech and presented the first look video of Id Tech 5. Carmack has always opted for OpenGL over DirectX for several reasons, among them the ability to easily port over to Mac and Linux PCs. Carmack confirmed multiplatform development for Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox 360 and PS3.
OmniMap API - Real-Time Geometry Correction Library
Categories: General |
Jun 12, 2007
Free OmniMap API beta now available, Beta testers needs for OpenGL dome-correction libraries. Want to dome-enable your real-time OpenGL application? The OmniMap™ Geometry Correction Library API provides developers with an easy-to-integrate solution to make real-time OpenGL applications compatible with OmniFocus ™ projection systems. It takes advantage of the latest accelerated graphics hardware and OpenGL 2.0 extensions to increase performance over previous geometry correction software solutions.
Parallels Promises 3-D Windows Games on Intel Macs
Categories: General |
Jun 12, 2007
Parallels Inc. will add 3-D graphics support to its virtualization software for running Windows programs on Intel-based Macs, the company said yesterday. This will let Mac users play top-tier PC games. Desktop 3.0 for Mac, which the Renton, Wash., company said would launch “in a couple of weeks,” will support both DirectX and OpenGL titles in Windows virtual machines.
Sample code for using OpenGL with Python
Categories: Developers |
Jun 12, 2007
Sample code that demonstrates how to use OpenGL with Python and PyGame. Shows how to create a simple 3D world and build a ‘fly-cam’ to explore it. The code is taken from the forthcoming book from APress, ‘Beginning Game Development with Python and PyGame’.
ActiveSolid Professonal v2.5 adds associative angular and radial dimensions
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 12, 2007
ActiveSolid Professional is an Open-GL based dual mode (both end user application and ActiveX control) 3D modeling, mark-up and visualization application. The entire application including its user interface can be embedded inside any ActiveX hosts such as Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office applications.
Stellarium announces v0.9.0
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 07, 2007
The Stellarium team are proud to announce the release version 0.9.0 of Stellarium, the open source planetarium for your computer. Stellarium uses OpenGL to show a realistic sky in 3D, just like you would see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. Just set your coordinates and go.
Parallels sends 50 new features to beta testers
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 07, 2007
Parallels has announced that its private beta community has begun testing the first Release Candidate of the next version of its eponymous virtualisation software, which enables Macs to run Windows within OS X. Parallels Desktop 3.0 contains over 50 new features, including SmartSelect, a cross-platform file and application integration feature, support for DirectX and OpenGL 3D graphics and easy backup and restore via Snapshots.
OpenGL Pipeline Q1 2007 now available in PDF format
Categories: General |
Jun 06, 2007
The Q1 2007 release of the OpenGL Pipeline newsletter is now available in PDF format. This issue covers Climbing OpenGL Longs Peak – An OpenGL ARB Progress Update, Polygons In Your Pocket: Introducing OpenGL ES, a First Glimpse at the OpenGL SDK, Using the Longs Peak Object Model, ARB Next Gen TSG Update, GLSL: Center or Centroid? (Or When Shaders Attack!), OpenGL and Windows Vista™, Optimize Your Application Performance. Click here to get your copy now!
PyOpenGL uses ctypes for a 145% performance improvement
Categories: Developers |
Jun 04, 2007
Following last month’s POGL vs PyOpenGL benchmark, Graphcomp received numerous suggestions from the Python community on ways to improve PyOpenGL’s numbers. Most made no measurable difference - however, the suggestion to use ctypes (a Python Foreign Function Interface module) resulted in a 145% improvement in PyOpenGL performance. Read more about OpenGL Perl vs Python performance at http://graphcomp.com/opengl/benchmarks. Includes comments from PyOpenGL’s author explaining performance factors.
Galacticsoft releases new version of 3D Sci Fi Movie Maker
Categories: General | Applications |
Jun 01, 2007
Galacticsoft have released a new version of 3D Sci Fi Movie Maker. 3D Sci Fi Movie Maker is a fun creative tool design to help you make your own Sci Fi Movie classics. It’s ideal for making Sci Fi Homage clips for youtube, or for use in indie movie production. 3D Sci Fi Movie uses OpenGL technology to create amazing 3D Graphics. 3D Sci Fi Movie Maker runs under Windows 98/XP/Vista, and requires a computer with a graphics card that uses OpenGL technology.
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