what is disadvantages using glut compare to windows programming? i saw many top opengl portal like nehe, gamedev,game tutorial etc often using windows programming than sing glut… did wp better than glut?
One disadvantage, you have fewer UI options with GLUT. There are pop-up menus, and that’s about it.
There are actually many disdvantages with GLUT, but there are (at least) just as many disadvantages with win32 programming.
I think that many ppl chose win32 because they are control freaks (demo/game programmers tend to be), or because they actually do need the extra control offered by pure OS programming.
Now, GLUT in itself has many disadvantages that are mainly due to its lack of up-to-date design and code. On the other hand, the concept of GLUT (i.e. an OS-independent abstraction layer) is a very good one. Currently there are several newer toolkits that offer similar functionality as GLUT, but with a more modern design (GLFW, SDL, CPW, etc).
As it happens, I am the author of GLFW, and I strongly suggest that you do not go for win32 programming. It’s a much worse headache than you would first imagine. If you want to do it anyway, you should at least have a look at the source code for some of the toolkits available (GLFW is free & open source, for instance), to get an idea of the work involved in properly abstracting/using the Win32 API (hint: the NeHe code, for instance, is far from complete).
[This message has been edited by marcus256 (edited 09-21-2003).]
Originally posted by marcus256:
…As it happens, I am the author of GLFW, and I strongly suggest that you do not go for win32 programming. It’s a much worse headache than you would first imagine. If you want to do it anyway, you should at least have a look at the source code for some of the toolkits available (GLFW is free & open source, for instance), to get an idea of the work involved in properly abstracting/using the Win32 API (hint: the NeHe code, for instance, is far from complete)…
I took a look at GLFW and if it blends with the rest of your code then you’re on a good road. GLFW looks pretty fine, too bad it didn’t blend at all with my code
I use my own API (based on win32) for pure development and I must say glut rocks for simple research projects.