Re: [pygame] using opengl in pygame?

[Bob Ippolito <bob@redivi.com>]

On Jun 18, 2004, at 6:08 PM, israel@uandmedance.com wrote:

> What are the main benefits to using either SDL or OpenGL?  In what 
> circumstances would one be more advised to one over the other?  I keep 
> hearing lots of good stuff about OpenGL and lot's of mediocre stuff 
> about SDL.  It seems that OpenGL allows one to have a lot of nice 
> flexibility and functionality in one's poly based sprites, but at what 
> cost?  If OpenGL is so nice, why would one want to use SDL? Is there a 
> hardware barrier?  I've heard that while OpenGL is great for a lot of 
> things, It's performance really is dependent upon hardware capability. 
> More so, apparently than SDL.
OpenGL is a display API only.  It's common to use SDL for 
cross-platform input/audio and acquiring a display context, and OpenGL 
for the rest of it.  OpenGL is not going to be available or perform 
acceptably on several classes of devices and accelerated hardware 
support is shoddy or non-existent on many operating systems. though it 
is great on Windows and OS X.

> Is SDL kind of like and entry level grunt that'll handle most 
> everything you need, but if you want to get fancy do you break out the 
> OpenGL can of Whoopass?
OpenGL does one thing very well: accelerated 3D.  SDL does not do that 
at all, but it does several other things moderately well on many 
platforms.  SDL does simple 2D bitmap stuff, which OpenGL really isn't 
geared for... though on modern machines on some platforms OpenGL can be 
contorted to do 2D stuff in a MUCH more efficient way, but it requires 
a bit more effort from the programmer.  Additionally, there is 
(supposedly, don't know from experience) an experimental backend for 
SDL that uses OpenGL for its display layer, which means that eventually 
you can get most of the OpenGL speed with the same SDL API.

In other words, it really depends on what your target platform is and 
what you want to do.

> I haven't seen (though I've probably overlooked) extensive 
> documentation on using OpenGL in Python.  Should I look to the 
> PyOpenGL folks for that documentation?
No, you should look to the OpenGL folks for that documentation.  
PyOpenGL exposes nearly the same API you get from C, with the obvious 
pythonification of arguments.

-bob

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