Hi,
I currently teach Games programming using Opengl. The problem is that the students do not get very far towards a working game because of the short time available and the fact that they are novice programmers. I would like to stick with OpenGl because it is an industry standard and will be advantageous for them in terms of helping them get into the industry. I am looking for libraries of functions for things like loading and rendering animated meshes, moving a camera around a world, constructing and rendering skyboxes,terrain etc.
Does anyone know of anything available in terms of a library that can be called from opengl and c - bearing in mind that the users are students and it needs to be relatively simple to use. I have searched quite a lot but been unable to find anything suitable.
Thanks. Yes it looks good. The trouble is that Irrlicht as I understand it obscures the OpenGl totally. The course we teach is aiming to provide some fluency in using OpenGL. I have myself written simple MD2 loader, terrain generator, skybox generator and camera functions to extend OpenGl so that we can get something like a game in the time available. My functions are fairly simple though - my md2 loader does not do animations for example and I dont have time at present to extend it. I am just very surprised with all the software surounding OpenGl that there does not seem to exist a library of functions or classes like model loaders for example that can be ‘taken off the shelf’
Irrlicht does all the things you need but like you noticed, yes it does act on top of openGL. From what I have seen, other libraries (that do things like load md2 files, animations, draw sky boxes) follow the same approach of abstracting the low-level nature of openGL into C++. I am talking about example openGL.org referenced libraries here.
I am curious about this topic also – I ran accross a year old webpage that looks promising here.. It list alot of libraries I haven’t heard of so maybe one or a combination of those might help.
The tools/libraries I have relied upon are
SDL or GLUT for general openGL context/window
FTGL for openGL 3d Fonts
DevIL for image texture loading
GLEW for GL extensions
SDL_mixer/SDL_sound for sound
Irrlicht for animation,skybox, etc
“Newton Game Dynamics” for Physics
Thanks. The link you provide looks pretty good. Will take me a while to investigate. Will let you know if i find anything that fits the bill.