This is a mite off topic, but can you elaborate on the difficulties of
getting openGL drivers for hardware? I mean, I have never had any
problems, but I am a gamer and have only ever owned nvidia, ATI and 3dfx
(FTW!) cards. Are other chipsets unsupported by their makers? What are
these chipsets, so that I may avoid them!
This is what happens when money, greed and the need for control comes
before standards (either defacto or agreed upon) and treating your
customers right. Sorry, sorry, I know there was supposed to be no
flames, but I get pretty angry as I see companies subvert technology for
their own gains all the time. Feel free to ignore this last paragraph....
Bob Pendleton wrote:
I teach a game programming class at the local community college. To save time, effort, and confusion, I use SDL and OpenGL to teach with. I let the students use anything they want to develop with, any OS and any libraries, but I strongly encourage them to use SDL and OpenGL. I teach this class during fall semester and have taught it for several years.
This approach has worked very well in the past, but this year, not so
good. In the past everyone was able to get a high performance version of
OpenGL working on there computers. This year, only a couple were able to
get OpenGL working on their computers. In several cases there just
weren't any decent OpenGL libraries for their video cards and the
default MS drivers are terrible, when they work at all.
So I have a couple of questions for the groups.
o Is OpenGL still a viable graphics API for use on Windows? o Is there an open source, C/C++, 3D graphics API that works on top of OpenGL on the rest of the world and DirectX on Windows? (I know that Java 3D does that but it isn't much use to SDL programmers.) o Can SDL stay a viable library if OpenGL support on Windows is really as bad as it looks?
Please, no flames, not even anti-Microsoft flames. We have all heard them all before and no matter how mad you are about the state of the world the state of the world is what it is and flaming doesn't help. (You have no idea how hard it is for an old flamer like me to say something like that :-)
I have cross posted this message to the SDL mailing list and to my own mailing list to try to get different points of view. If you are on only one mailing list and want to see both sides of the discussion please join the other mailing list.
Bob Pendleton
-- Jacob Briggs Systems Engineer
Core Technology Limited Level 1, NZX Centre 11 Cable Street Wellington Phone +64 4 499-1108
--
Named after its country of origin 'England', English is a little known dialect used by up to 1.5 billion non-Americans worldwide. Some interesting but obviously incorrect features of the language include:
- queues of people - wonderful coloUrs - the useful metal aluminIum - the exotic herbs (h-urbs), basil (ba-zil) and oregano (o-re-gaa-no) - specialiSed books called 'dictionaries' that tell you how to spell words correctly
Many people using this bizarre gutter speak also subscribe to the pagan belief that water freezes at 0 degrees and that distances should be measured in the forbidden mathematical system of base-10...
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