Riven X 0.7d4 is now available. This release introduces preliminary fullscreen support, browsable journals and the journal inventory. See the release notes for more details.
Download Riven X 0.7d4 (5.1 MB).
Nov 292008
Nov 052008
Once again, the American people have shown what they’re made of by electing Barack Obama the 44th president of the United States. From an unlikely and modest beginning to a resounding 330+ electoral college votes victory, the Obama campaign, and the movement behind it, has inspired millions to become active in the political process once again and change the direction of this great country.
As a Canadian citizen, I was not involved in this generational transition, in this replacement of the old guard, in this repudiation of business and politics as usual. But I certainly supported it in every way I could and was excited by it, because so much of our world, let alone Canada, is tied to the United States, for better or worse.
I believe the Obama administration will have a tremendously positive impact in both internal affairs and international issues, not because Obama is a miracle man, but because he is an exceedingly intelligent and thoughtful man who seeks the advise of experts, not political pundits and ideologues, and strives to achieve concrete results over making a point. The fact that I strongly support his policies is simply because they make sense and are the right thing to do to make everybody better off, including American businesses.
In a way, this is more of a victory of pragmatism over ideology and demagoguery than a Democrats victory over Republicans. Indeed, the GOP has become the ideological party, and is now doomed to irrelevancy unless they reform themselves in profound ways.
So, from a Canadian living in California, tip of the hat to my American friends for doing yourselves and the world a huge favor.
Oct 212008
NVIDIA released a new version of their beta ForceWare 180 drivers. There are 2 very interesting things about it worth mentioning.
First, it supports most of the OpenGL 3 ARB extensions, bringing some useful functionality such as vertex array objects (which first appeared on Mac OS X many years ago) and looser restrictions on framebuffer attachments with respect to their resolution.
However, the most exciting new feature is support for EXT_direct_state_access. That extension addresses a long-standing problem of the OpenGL API, namely state selectors. Indeed, there are quite a large number of functions in OpenGL whose behavior is affected by a number of state variables. For instance, the LoadMatrix* commands depend on the current matrix mode state. As the name suggest, EXT_direct_state_access adds a large number of new functions to OpenGL that explicitly take as an argument the object or piece of state to be modified, bypassing state selectors. This allows, for example, to load a texture matrix without changing the matrix mode first, or to change a texture parameter without binding that texture first.
As the EXT prefix suggests, this extensions is probably not likely to be adopted in the core specification in the next revision of OpenGL 3, but there’s a good chance it might be promoted to ARB, and integrated into core OpenGL by the 3.2 timeframe. This is pure speculation on my part, but this extension is something that a lot of people in the industry desire, so there should be momentum behind it.
Oct 062008
GLee is my favorite OpenGL extension “manager” due to its simplicity (2 files to add to your project) and ease of use (just use one of the GLEE extension variables in an if statement, and function pointers are automatically bound).
Sep 242008
NVIDIA has posted some OpenGL-related presentations from their recent NVISION 08 conference. I found the one on the GeForce 8 features and Cg particularly good with respect to introducing some modern OpenGL functionality and giving a sense of direction for the API.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/nvision08-opengl2.html
Also check out the NVSG presentation with has some OpenGL related content.
Sep 172008
AMD has released ATI Catalyst™ 8.9, which includes a number of OpenGL 3 extensions:
- ARB_half_float_pixel
- ARB_draw_instanced
- ARB_instanced_arrays
- ARB_map_buffer_range
- EXT_texture_compression_3dc
- EXT_texture_compression_rgtc
- EXT_texture_compression_latc
- EXT_texture_shared_exponent
- EXT_depth_buffer_float
- EXT_gpu_shader4
The addition of the geometry instancing extensions and of gpu_shader4 (GLSL 1.20) is particularly significant, as they expose functionality that has been available since DirectX™ 9, and of course DirectX™ 10 features as well.
OpenGL extensions on Google Code
Computer Graphics
Comments Off
Sep 102008
I just stumbled on this Google Code project which is categorizing and documenting OpenGL extensions. It should prove to be a very useful reference, check it out.
Forward-compatible OpenGL 3.0 constants
Computer Graphics
Comments Off
Sep 072008
Michael Lucas-Smith posted on his blog a list of forward-compatible OpenGL 3.0 constants. This, combined with my list of forward-compatible OpenGL 3.0 entry points, should help people write future-proof OpenGL code.
The Riven X and MPQKit Trac wikis are finally back online. Although development has moved to Launchpad, the wikis still contain quite a bit of useful information, as well as milestone planning and open bugs. In particular, the MPQKit wiki has the MPQ format specification page, which is quite complete.
This list only includes core entry points; constants and extensions are forthcoming. The commands are categorized according their purpose or “main concern”. Any entry point not listed is deprecated by Appendix E of the OpenGL 3.0 specification. Finally, entry point variants are not listed (f, i, v, etc.) and the “gl” prefix is omitted.
Comments to improve this list or to notify me of factual errors are welcome; the entry will be updated as needed.
Update (2008-09-08): Michael Lucas-Smith posted on his blog a list of forward-compatible OpenGL 3.0 constants. This, combined with my list of forward-compatible OpenGL 3.0 entry points, should help people write future-proof OpenGL code.
Update (2008-10-17): Added TexSubImage* to the list in the texture objects section. Thanks to an anonymous poster for noticing the omission.
Buffer objects
- BindBuffer
- BufferData
- BufferSubData
- DeleteBuffers
- FlushMappedBufferRange
- GenBuffers
- GetBufferParameter*
- GetBufferPointer*
- GetBufferSubData
- IsBuffer
- MapBuffer
- MapBufferRange
- UnmapBuffer
Drawing
- DrawArrays
- DrawElements
- DrawRangeElements
- MultiDrawArrays
- MultiDrawElements
Drawing control
- BeginConditionalRender
- ClampColor
- ClipPlane
- CullFace
- DepthRange
- EndConditionalRender
- FrontFace
- Hint
- LineWidth width larger than 1.0 are deprecated
- PointParameter*
- PointSize
- PolygonMode FRONT_AND_BACK is the only valid face
- SampleCoverage
- Scissor
- ShadeModel
Framebuffer
- Clear
- ClearBuffer*
- ClearColor
- ClearStencil
- ClearDepth
- ColorMask*
- DepthMask
- DrawBuffer
- DrawBuffers
- StencilMask
- StencilMaskSeparate
Framebuffer objects
- BindFragDataLocation
- BindFramebuffer
- BindRenderbuffer
- BlitFramebuffer
- CheckFramebufferStatus
- DeleteFramebuffers
- DeleteRenderbuffers
- FramebufferRenderbuffer
- FramebufferTexture*
- FramebufferTextureLayer
- GenerateMipmap
- GenFramebuffers
- GenRenderbuffers
- GetFragDataLocation
- GetFramebufferAttachmentParameter*
- GetRenderbufferParameter*
- IsFramebuffer
- IsRenderbuffer
- RenderbufferStorage
- RenderbufferStorageMultisample
Miscellaneous
- Disable
- Enable
- Finish
- Flush
Pixel operations
- BlendColor
- BlendEquation
- BlendEquationSeparate
- BlendFunc
- BlendFuncSeparate
- DepthFunc
- LogicOp
- StencilFunc
- StencilFuncSeparate
- StencilOp
- StencilOpSeparate
Pixel read-write
- PixelStore*
- ReadBuffer
- CopyPixels
- ReadPixels
Query objects
- BeginQuery
- DeleteQueries
- GenQueries
- IsQuery
- EndQuery
- GetQuery*
- GetQueryObject*
Shader and program objects
- AttachShader
- CompileShader
- CreateProgram
- CreateShader
- DeleteProgram
- DeleteShader
- DetachShader
- GetAttachedShaders
- GetProgram*
- GetProgramInfoLog
- GetShader*
- GetShaderInfoLog
- GetShaderSource
- IsProgram
- IsShader
- LinkProgram
- ShaderSource
- UseProgram
- ValidateProgram
Shader uniforms
- GetActiveUniform
- GetUniformLocation
- GetUniform*
- Uniform1*
- Uniform2*
- Uniform3*
- Uniform4*
- UniformMatrix2*
- UniformMatrix2x3*
- UniformMatrix2x4*
- UniformMatrix3*
- UniformMatrix3x2*
- UniformMatrix3x4*
- UniformMatrix4*
- UniformMatrix4x2*
- UniformMatrix4x3*
State requests
- GetBooleanv
- GetClipPlane
- GetDoublev
- GetError
- GetFloatv
- GetIntegerv
- GetString
- GetTexEnv* target TEXTURE_ENV is deprecated
- IsEnabled
Texture objects
- ActiveTexture
- BindTexture
- CompressedTexImage*
- CompressedTexSubImage*
- CopyTexImage*
- CopyTexSubImage*
- DeleteTextures
- GetCompressedTexImage
- GetTexImage
- GetTexParameter* all texture border parameters are deprecated, automatic mipmap generation is deprecated, target TEXTURE_PRIORITY is deprecated
- GetTexLevelParameter*
- GenTextures
- IsTexture
- TexEnv target TEXTURE_ENV is deprecated
- TexImage* legacy OpenGL 1.0 internal formats (1, 2, 3, 4) are deprecated
- TexParameter* all texture border parameters are deprecated, automatic mipmap generation is deprecated, target TEXTURE_PRIORITY is deprecated
- TexSubImage*
Transform
- Viewport
Transform feedback
- BeginTransformFeedback
- BindBufferBase
- BindBufferRange
- EndTransformFeedback
- GetTransformFeedbackVaryings
- TransformFeedbackVaryings
Vertex arrays
- DisableVertexAttribArray
- EnableVertexAttribArray
- GetVertexAttribIPointer*
- GetVertexAttribPointer*
- VertexAttribIPointer
- VertexAttribPointer
Vertex array objects
- BindVertexArray
- DeleteVertexArrays
- GenVertexArrays
- IsVertexArray
Vertex attributes
- BindAttribLocation
- GetActiveAttrib
- GetAttribLocation
- GetVertexAttrib*
- VertexAttrib1*
- VertexAttrib2*
- VertexAttrib3*
- VertexAttrib4N*
- VertexAttrib4*
- VertexAttribI*
- VertexAttribI4*