What is OpenGL32?

[Brian Fleming]

What is OpenGl32?? It's frustrating that the sample code NEVER explains
what the topic is. The best description they come up with "This is an
OpenGL demo". But it never says what OpenGL is, for crying out loud.

Programmers out there... Please assume that people reading your readme.txt
files will not have knowledge of every single aspect of WIN programming.

Thanks for any help. It's very much appreciated.

[John A. Grant]

Brian Fleming wrote in message <68gmni$14lu$2...@piglet.cc.uic.edu>...

OpenGL was created by SGI. It's an API for graphics functions,
with great strength in 3D graphics. It is available on a variety of
platforms including Windows and is licenced from SGI.

The 3D screensavers (Pipes, FlowerBox etc) in NT4 are all
OpenGL apps.

It should be a relatively trivial exercise to port an OpenGL app to
any platform that supports OpenGL. Another strength of using
OpenGL is that there are video boards that can accelerate the
3D functions, allowing a great increase in speed. For example,
Diamond Monster 3D & Canopus Pure3D boards (3DFX chipset),
Diamond Stealth S220 (Rendition V2100 chipset) and Matrox M3D
(PowerVR PCX2 chipset) are all superb video boards that
support OpenGL acceleration. These are some of the 'hot'
boards that will greatly enhance Quake II performance when
using OpenGL rendering.

I'm getting a bit off-topic here, but a good summary of current
3D boards can be seen in Brian Hook's (Id Software) .plan:
http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=bwh&id=5044
Select the "12/30/97 21:50" entry from the drop-down list.

Here's a good FAQ for OpenGL, 3D & GLQuake:
http://www.planetquake.com/gldojo/faq.html

And of course, you can go straight to the OpenGL source:
http://www.sgi.com/Technology/OpenGL/

--
John A. Grant * I speak only for myself * (remove 'z' to
reply)
Airborne Geophysics, Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa
If you followup, please do NOT e-mail me a copy: I will read it here.

[Jason Stevens]

In article <68gmni$14lu$2...@piglet.cc.uic.edu>, bfle...@eecs.uic.edu says...

>
>What is OpenGl32?? It's frustrating that the sample code NEVER explains
>what the topic is. The best description they come up with "This is an
>OpenGL demo". But it never says what OpenGL is, for crying out loud.
>
>Programmers out there... Please assume that people reading your readme.txt
>files will not have knowledge of every single aspect of WIN programming.
>
>Thanks for any help. It's very much appreciated.
>

OpenGL is a "Open Graphics Language"... It's a high level abstraction for 3d
modeling... According to most people better than direct 3d. It's from Silicon
Graphics BTW... The whole selling point of OpenGL is that the calls are
portable.... (IE Unix'en and WindozeNT, OS/2 and various other OpenGL supported
OS's)

Microsoft firt put it in Windows NT to prove that it was a capable
"workstation" operating system... Now I think that they regret it because of
the "open" word... =) (Ie open standard not controlled by Microsoft)

TTYL!

Jason Stevens

[Jerry Coffin]

In article <68gmni$14lu$2...@piglet.cc.uic.edu>, bfle...@eecs.uic.edu
says...
> What is OpenGl32?? It's frustrating that the sample code NEVER explains
> what the topic is. The best description they come up with "This is an
> OpenGL demo". But it never says what OpenGL is, for crying out loud.
>
> Programmers out there... Please assume that people reading your readme.txt
> files will not have knowledge of every single aspect of WIN programming.

OpenGL is a graphics programming API originally invented by Silicon
Graphics. On Windows the DLL that implements this API is named
OpenGL32.dll, if memory serves.

Basically put, it's a big set of functions that make 3D programming
much simpler. In general, instead of dealing with actually drawing 3
dimensional objects, you make a series of function calls that provide
a description of the objects you want drawn such as their size,
position in space, surface reflectivity, etc. You can also describe
things like lights. Then the OpenGL library figures out how the
lights affect the objects and draws a picture in the window of how
that object looks under that lighting. Of course you can also do
things like changing the point of view of the window as well.

--
Later,
Jerry.

The Universe is a figment of its own imagination.

[Jerry Coffin]

In article <691vc1$4n$2...@news.icanect.net>, jas...@members.icanect.net
says...

[ ... ]

> OpenGL is a "Open Graphics Language"... It's a high level abstraction for 3d
> modeling... According to most people better than direct 3d. It's from Silicon
> Graphics BTW... The whole selling point of OpenGL is that the calls are
> portable.... (IE Unix'en and WindozeNT, OS/2 and various other OpenGL supported
> OS's)

There is no one "whole selling point" of OpenGL -- it takes quite a
number of good points to establish something as a standard. OpenGL is
certainly not the first or only attempt at portable graphics, but it's
been far more successful than most.

As far as simply being "better than Direct 3D", it would appear that
(among others) Silicon Graphics doesn't agree: they recently announced
that they're working with MS to produce a new graphics language
intended to combine the strengths of OpenGL and D3D.

> Microsoft firt put it in Windows NT to prove that it was a capable
> "workstation" operating system... Now I think that they regret it because of
> the "open" word... =) (Ie open standard not controlled by Microsoft)

Hmm...this doesn't seem to fit well with the facts. MS has continued
quite aggressive development of OpenGL on NT. Just for example, MS's
version of OpenGL for NT was the first to support OpenGL 1.1. I don't
just mean the first on NT -- I mean it was the first complete retail
implementation of OpenGL 1.1 by anybody, anywhere, on any platform.