Re: Not a HOWTO but a guide of some sort...

[Bert Peers <rat@larian.com>]

Johnny Taporg wrote:

> I'll tackle this one.

Awesome overview !  Somebody better sums this up and put
it on the site !.. :)
  This is really great, one tends to drown in the URLs otherwise..
Cool !

> SDL is a simple, straightforward game library, which
> is straightforward, lightweight fast.  It gives you
> basically what you'd expect - blitting etc.  It is
> intended for source-level cross platform compatibility.
> It also includes sound code and thread code, but I
> haven't looked at that closely.

I was under the impression (by peeking at it very remotely)
that SDL is actually the engine underlying some of the
other SDKs as well ?

> First of all, if you're doing anything 3D, OpenGL is
> *the* 3D API to use.  It's standard, it's been around
> for years, and I expect it to be around even after
> microsofts D3D dies.

Actually, rumour has it that D3D (== MS) and OpenGL
(== SGI) are going to merge in DX, euh, was it version 9 ?
Codename Fahrenheit, released in, er, 2 years or something.
So OpenGL 2.0 would become Fahrenheit 1.0, ditto for
Direct3D 9.0.

> Glide is a library released by 3Dfx to interface their
> line of 3D accelerator chips, notably the Voodoos.  I
> haven't looked at it, so I'm not going to comment on
> it specifically, but Mesa will run on top of it.

The Glide 3.0 SDK was released some time ago for the
Win platform, it offers a preparation for a move to
windowed rendering (clip coordinates) and totally
customisable vertex formats, among other things.
At ECTS a 3Dfx spokesman promised me they're
actively supporting work for moving it to Linux, but
I haven't checked recently if the 3.0 has been
released or even announced.
  As an API, it's even simpler than OpenGL, and exposes
a whole bunch of texture formats and texture stage
tricks you don't get from OGL or D3D.  It's neat.
  BTW There was some work to make a D3D wrapper
for 3Dfx, which really means porting the Glide API to
non-3Dfx chipsets.  3Dfx lawyers crashed this project
though (not surprisingly).

Bert
--

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