The State of OpenGL 273
CowboyRobot writes "No longer vapor, but a true 3D-embedded engine, OpenGL is on the move. Pixar and others would love to be able to render their movies in realtime, and that desire has prompted the intended release of OpenGL 2.0, due in a few months. Khronos is now in charge of further extending OpenGL to cellphones and handheld gaming devices."
Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
I want business class reliability, not a the ability to rent subpar games on my cell phone for $5/month.
When I'm on the phone all day because of my work I want it to be there for important calls, not fizzle out after an hour because it's got a 640x480 pixel screen with 24-bit color.
OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:5, Insightful)
Although right now OpenGL is all that's out there for low-cost portable embedded 3D software, no one is going to develop with it until hardware support emerges. Who wants a handheld 3D mapping device that takes 10 seconds to redraw a frame using an ARM9 software renderer?
Re:Pixlet (Score:-1, Insightful)
Think before you mod or reply and read the articles.
OGL alone is not enough for gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank you for your time,
BBH
Re:Damn them (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Damn them (Score:1, Insightful)
They will give everyone a color phone with polyphonic ring tones to increase the potential market for rentable games and downloadable ring tones.
Isn't that what YOU'D do if you were a major dealer like Verizon?
Re:article text (Score:4, Insightful)
Say what?
You don't get much higher-level than a scenegraph API like Java3D.
I think the author may have been confused, although he did get the overall point right. OpenGL ES on J2ME will probably be the way this goes.
Re:OpenGL ES with hardware support? (Score:5, Insightful)
After having a look at the spec, OpenGL ES seems -1, Redundant. Why not just aim for full OpenGL, starting with a 'MiniGL/QuakeGL' style implementation, of the sort which really got the ball rolling on the PC.
However, I believe it does include fixed-point maths support - very useful for all the ARM-based devices out there with no FPU.
Re:Damn them (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
How about realizing that there are other users out there? How about realizing that teenagers ( a gigantic market, by any measure ) might WANT their phones to play games?
Be a little more myopic next time, AC...
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
So - *IF* we want 3D then we want OpenGL.
But do we want 3D in cellphones?
The supposed 'killer app' for 3D on cellphones is the idea of using the positioning detecting capability of the phone - along with network access - to provide an annotated 3D map of your present location. Think of the navigation systems in cars - but in 3D - so you can find the elevator you need to get to a particular office in a big unfamiliar building - or find where you left your car in an multistory parking lot.
Games will obviously use the technology too.
I don't know whether this is important to people or not - but if 3D is happening, it should CERTAINLY be in OpenGL - initially a small subset - gradually improving to a full-blown implementation in every phone as the technology catches up.
Personally, I'd be much happier with a last-generation basic phone that had 10x battery life and didn't lose service quite so easily.
Wait for the OpenGL hardware (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Damn them (Score:5, Insightful)
2) Eventually cell phones, pdas, computers, entertainment devices (tivo,etc) will converge into one or two devices, one of which will be portable. This is one item on the continuum leading towards the ubiquitous always on computing device.
3) OpenGL on the cell phone is simply a way of saying, "OpenGL on any platform requiring 3d graphics." It's marketting. It may not be used heavily on cell phones, but perhaps new a new HDTV format will allow for an opengl data stream to place products in pretaped shows for different areas (ie, midwest viewers see a CVS pharmacy, while southeast see an Eckard). Having a pared down implementation meant for little processors and low resolution screens is an asset. Don't abuse the implementation if the idea can be generalized.
-Adam
To my understanding... (Score:5, Insightful)
For one, direct3d is integrated into the direct api which handles a multitude of things, multimedia and game input devices among others, that game developers are almost naturally drawn to by the appeal that so much work has already been done for them
OpenGL can't and really shouldn't have to address all these requirements, but it's just part of why there's been this ongoing struggle. SDL is a reasonable answer to portability while still accomplishing the integration that MS has achieved, but SDL isn't really as mainstream as OpenGL is.
I've seen soap opera plots that were less convoluted than this mess.
Thank you so much! (Score:3, Insightful)
Innovative? They didn't do jack with 3D until OpenGL came along and showed them how. They had to buy it from SGI. This has been documented.
Resilient? Dictionary.com defines this as "Marked by the ability to recover readily, as from misfortune." This is actually true, as they were behind, and had to play catch-up. 10 years later, they have caught up with (and arguably surpassed) a technology that has changed very little. Until now.
If this is what defines one who "rules," I'd rather that MSFT "rules" while other companies and organizations just make better stuff.
Cell Phones? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Damn them (Score:2, Insightful)
Next time my car breaks down and I have to call for help I'll remember how stupid my parents were for getting me a phone instead of a pager.
Re:I hope so (Score:3, Insightful)
Duke's overall game percentaging was very well-thought-out. The impact of various munitions was adjusted such that you didn't die too quickly, but still the relative damage levels incurred appeared realistic. And again, when a pipe bomb or a laser trip bomb went off, it would destroy any nearby breakable objects or windows, as you would expect it to do. In games like Half Life or Quake, everything around you is pretty much explosion and/or bulletproof, and that isn't particularly realistic.
Playability is the key to a game with staying power, and playability is, unfortunately, not something that has achieved much focus in recent games. It also is not intrinsically bound up with the graphic quality of the visual environment. The majority of development effort has been expended in creating gorgeous 3-D environments, not good games. A game is supposed to be entertaining, and once the "oooh!" and "ahhhh!" wears off, if the product isn't truly playable you'll find yourself not playing it no matter how pretty the pictures are. At that point you've just wasted your money.
Re:Cell Phones? (Score:1, Insightful)
Real time films? Not any time soon. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:To my understanding... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ABOUT DAMN TIME! (Score:4, Insightful)
2) OpenGL has numerous releases in the last few years. 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 were all released in quick succession. What rock have you been hiding under?
There's more than graphics... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Over the next year or two, I think you're going to see a whole range of applications that use your graphics board as a supercomputer," Trevett says enthusiastically.
was the most interesting part of the article?
SETI@home [berkeley.edu], Finite Element Analysis [hks.com], video recoding [exit1.org] are all areas which could benefit from vector processing , matrix calculation and/or huge register sizes provided by GPUs.
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing (Score:3, Insightful)
I remember seeing an image of that in an old computer graphics "coffee table"-type book back in high school - and you mentioning that popped it in my head...
Re:Damn them (Score:3, Insightful)
As virtually all new phones come with Java built-in, its kind of moronic not to use it.
Of course, if you prefer wasting your time hard-coding OpenGL calls and re-compiling for each make of phone, that is up to you, but as a business model its suicide.