How about these?

Seeing as how the first OpenGL was far in excess of the hardware of the day. HArdware has pretty much caught up now, another large jump is necessary.

How about…

Surface Subdivision
Programmable Shading
Displacement Mapping (i.e. changing Geometry based on a texture)
More advanced texture filtering (e.g. Gaussian Filter Kernels)

[This message has been edited by willow (edited 03-01-2000).]

Surface subdivision - I’m not 100% convinced that this should be hidden inside the API layer, as the application will very often need access to the subdivided geometry for patch stitching, collision detection etc. I know the Id folks had a lot of problems with this during the development of Q3A, and I suspect hiding the implementation would just compound the problem.

Programmable shading is due out this year in hardware (PixelFusion), will be accessible via extensions. I agree though, given the snail’s pace at which the ARB works, it’d be nice to get this in the spec even though it won’t have widespread hardware support for another couple of years.

Displacement mapping is a knotty one. It’d be extremely cool, yes, but I can’t see how things like frustrum clipping or backface culling are going to work when bits of a surface can stick out from the plane defined by the poly verts.

Originally posted by MikeC:

Displacement mapping, but I can’t see how things like frustrum clipping or backface culling are going to work when bits of a surface can stick out from the plane defined by the poly verts.

I was actually thinking of moving the poly verts. So the cull is the same as long as it is after the mapping. Only really useful on V.highly tessalated models though.

I’m just trying to think how we move GL on to the next gen.

I’m just trying to think how we move GL on to the next gen.

Here’s a thought.
Speed up software rendering, it’s current software renderer is pretty fast, but not as fast as it should be!

Software Speed is just an impementation issue, not really tied to the OpenGL spec.

And anyway, is it really necessary when every PC you buy has at least some acceleration of OGL in it. (even it it’s just an ATI )

[This message has been edited by willow (edited 03-04-2000).]

about programmable shading… i was thinking about it some months ago… but how deep can be the control over such a low level process?
how can it be faster?

the really question is: where i can find thecnical infos about this issue?

Dolo//\ightY