On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 4:15 AM, Christian Schladetsch < christian.schladetsch@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Carlos,
On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 8:59 PM, Carlos Rafael Giani < e0325834@student.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
joel wrote:
Make this some kind of boost::graphics, target both dx and ogl or w/e in a seamless fashion, then you have something worthy.
This is commonly found in 3D graphics engines. However, a low level ogl/dx abstraction is time-consuming, and ultimately not worth it, because both APIs, while roughly equal, differ in many details, which sums up in a low-level abstraction that covers the lowest common denominator. It is better to abstract in a higher semantic level, however this is hard to accomplish as a general 3D rendering library (and probably not very useful, since rendering applications vary wildly in their feature requirements and applied techniques).
I have repeatedly stated my belief that it is futile, if not insane, to attempt to make a system that uses either DirectX or OpenGL.
Definitely not futile. Insane, maybe. Alot of commercial 3d graphics engines support both (or at least they used to). A lot of games support both. Even if these games / engines simply implement two completely separate engines with a switch statement to choose between them, there still must be some common interface. I also don't think that such a library would need to be complete, or even almost complete. Just allowing basic 3d functionality in a cross platform manner would be enough to warrant serious consideration. And just think, once it _is_ in Boost, with minimal opengl support and minimal directx support, a bunch of other developers would likely jump on board and do a lot of the things you don't want to do.