Frameworks and what parts do we want to write ourselves?

[Freakazo]

Do we want to write the components that deals with creation of windows, getting user input etc. or will we use libraries for them? Maybe a good way to get a consensus of what we want to work on and what not. So reply here with what parts you guys think we should be worried about and what not.

I'd like not to rely on too many frameworks which might hide some magic which would be useful to learn. However I'm not sure how much work it is and I can be completely underestimating the amount of work, especially considering that we'll have to write multi-platform code. Thoughts?

[DeusexConstantia]

I'd say we should aim to write everything high level ourselves ( maybe use libraries for file parsing ). We can always go back to using a library if it turns out it is too much work.

We should, if we decide to use libraries, always go for open source ones so we can at least see what happens. Thus we should maybe go for FreeGlut or GLFW or the like instead of glut ( if we use one at all ).

[Augusto Noronha]

I agree with DeusEx in this one. I think we will learn more trying and then using a library if we realize it's too much work than using frameworks for the start.

[A M]

I would say to use C++ and allegro as a game engine.

[Freakazo]

I had a quick look at the docs for allegro while trying to get cmake to work with it, but it seems at least for 2D it hides everything to do with opengl? Wouldn't something like freeglut be a better alternative?

[DeusexConstantia]

The documentation also seem to be deprecated in part, as the "2D with openGL" portion uses the function pipeline ( also some of it seems to either not work properly with my setup or is false).
http://open.gl/ seems to favour newer stuff like SDL or GFWL instead of freeglut and glut, but if we write everything ourselves we just need to set up and OpenGL context and can implement the rest ourselves, using just GLEW and the Opengl headers. So it wouldn't really matter what we use to set up the context ( and I really don't think we should  set it up ourselves, because that is platform specific and not even in the OpenGL spec as I learned today ).

[Freakazo]

I had a look at all of them, allegro/GLFW/SDL and so far GLFW seems to be exactly what we want and nothing extra. Only handling the cross-platform issues and not replacing game engine functionality we'll want to write ourselves. I'm going to setup the build scripts that will allow us to use GLFW or our own custom window and opengl context creation because I'd like to continue working on that, but for the most part we will end up using GLFW otherwise we'll wait to long window/opengl context creation before we even really touch opengl.

Read the user guide for GLFW especially the introduction to get an overview on GLFW.

http://www.glfw.org/GLFWUsersGuide276.pdf

I committed the changes to use GLFW. For linux you'll have to download and install it using sudo make x11-install (IIRC). On windows I'm not 100% sure, I think we'll have to change the build scripts to set the glfw directories as options.

windowTest now displays a simple triangle using immediate mode opengl for testing purposes, everyone should try to get that working. Next up is getting model loading and displaying working.