[self-interest] OpenGL (was: questions)

[Josh Flowers]

> More than nice - it would be great! But my experience with OpenGL has
> not been very positive, specially on the PC (Windows and Linux). I get
> the feeling that Microsoft is actively trying to give the standard a
> bad name so that developers move to DirectX 3D since four of four very
> different XP installations I have seen had broken OpenGL. Two were
> fixed by getting new drivers from the video card vendors but that
> didn't help the other two. Of course, Napoleon used to say not to
> ascribe to malice what could be explained by incompetence...

I must admit that I'm a long time Mac user, so on this front, my 
experience is much more limited than yours.

> But a problem with GL itself regarding GUIs is that it doesn't handle
> text or 2D textures very well (at least when I last looked into this)
> and needs help from some external program. Another problem is that it
> doesn't scale.

How does self handle text?  I didn't see any glue code that dealt with 
text, and so I'd hoped that self was doing the text rendering.  If 
that's the case, then GL's text support shouldn't be a problem.  I'm 
not sure what kind of 2D texture support you need....

You're also correct that GL doesn't scale down to low end machines very 
well, but it should be usable on 90%+ of the desk/laptop machines out 
there, which would be a good start.

> See http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/gmodel.html

Thanks, this looks to be an interesting read.

josh