Horde3D

Horde3D's rendering engine being based on OpenGL 2.1 I believe that this might be of importance to the community. You can get it here.

Are there any development plans of integrating this version of the api in the actual rendering engine?

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Paul

Given that Khronos completely nerfed the 3.0 spec, basically giving us OpenGL 2.2, Horde is in fact already compatible with this API.

For future compatibility, all we have to do is make sure that we aren't using any of the stuff that *might* be deprecated in the future (note that this deprecation is quite unlikely to all accounts), and start supporting the new extensions where appropriate.

We should be good already on the deprecation front, since Horde is pure shaders, and doesn't use the fixed function pipeline at all. As for the newer extensions, I have been eyeing a few of them for some months now, but don't have a card that supports them - when someone does, I am sure they will be implemented. Texture arrays are probably the most interesting to me, especially for render to texture, and after that, geometry shaders.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Doesn't the 2D overlay API use immediate mode? I believe that this is a candidate for deprecation.


Oh cool, I wasn't aware they added in a standard geometry shader extension:
http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/AR ... hader4.txt

"Wholey moley" take a look at these two threads...

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards ... w=1#UNREAD
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=504547

There is allot of hate flowing tonight towards OGL and the ARB.

I wouldn't like to be the guy doing the BOF on siggraph

I personally don't think that we should make Horde3D to require a 3.0 graphics card in the near future. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to run it on any of my computer hardware anymore
BTW: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html

Same here, but the Mac software renderer does have support for Geometry shaders, etc. so support for those features would be fun.
Since the spec only rolls extensions into core, and NVidai had all the extensions already, it wasn't too hard for them

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Hehe, on my computer it would still run
But since many people complain that even shader model 2.0 is a too strict minimum requirement, we should definitely not make GL 3.0 / SM 4 the required spec. Most game companies seem to focus on DX9 anyways, mostly because consoles have a DX 9.x feature set. That's good, so we won't get outdated too fast.