Brian Corrie (bcorrie++at++cs.anu.edu.au)
Thu, 18 Dec 1997 11:01:59 +1100
Here is my $0.02 on what I think is relatively close to the truth. That said,
I may be completely out to lunch as well.
>
> > No, Performer as you currently know it will not be available on NT.
> >
> > OpenGL++ is under development and will offer a cross platform MP
> > scene graph based graphics API.
>
>
> Unfortunately, unless I'm mistaken, no release date was announced... It would
> help people a great deal to have a rough estimation of OGL++ release date: Are
> we talking months or years?
I am under the impression that OpenGL++ is within sight of an alpha release
and from what I understand they are hoping for something beta/final to be
released mid-1998. A good place to find interesting tidbits of information is
at the OpenGL WWW site under the OpenGL ARB area:
http://www.opengl.org/ARB/ARB.html
In the Sept 8 meeting notes from the OpenGL++ subcomittee meeting they say
they are a few months from an Alpha release... From what I understand,
OpenGL++ wll be up for ARB approval sometime in the future and as Angus said
it is supposed to be a cross platform environment.
> Because of this uncertainty we started porting some of our Performer-based
> libraries to Optimizer/Cosomo3D. And yet, we also heard Cosomo3D would be
> abandoned. I wish we could move to cross-platform compatibility painlessly!
Again, from what I understand, the idea behind OpenGL++ is that a mixture of
all of the good, low level bits from Optimizer, Inventor, Cosmo3D, and
Performer will go into the OpenGL++ layer, with the higher level bits
implemented as Optimizer, Inventor, and Performer "modules" on top of OpenGL++.
We are in a similar situation to you in that we have an application that needs
to be written now, but we want to have cross platform capabilities in the
future. I have heard that the OpenGL++ API will be closest to the Cosmo3D API
than any of the others so that the route you are taking may be the best one.
Although we haven't decided completely yet (we are still experimenting) I
think that that is the route we are going to take. Our timing does not allow
us to wait for OpenGL++, so we are hopefully taking the correct course of
action to minimize the pain of moving to OpenGL++ when it is available.
In the September 8 OpenGL ARB Interest Subcomittee Meeting Notes a list of the
differences between Cosmo3D and OpenGL++ is mentioned. Does anyone out there
have this list? I think it would make for some interesting reading and would
be very helpful to people in our situation...
Cheers,
Brian
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