Re: [Glsdk-devel] util. lib brainstorming

[Stefanos A. <sta...@gm...>]

On Sun, 2008-08-24 at 21:36 +0300, =?ISO-8859-1?Q? Henri_H=E4kkinen _
wrote:
> I think having a simple menu bar would also be beneficial for the
> demos, as you could change some of the demo parameters from that
> interface. Such as, back face culling, front face winding etc. This is
> open for a debate.
> 
> On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 9:22 PM, Jason McKesson <ko...@gm...>
> wrote:
>         Henri Häkkinen wrote:
>         > - windowing system abstraction? Candidates; GLUT and GLFW.
>         we could
>         > also choose to implement our own windowlib that woudl
>         integrate into
>         > our GLE. This library would have features for opening
>         windows,
>         > creating simple menu bars, input processing etc.
>         
>         Creating a window with an OpenGL context is the limit of what
>         we should
>         provide.
>         
>         Now, that being said, there is something to be said for being
>         able to
>         handle input to some degree. This is mostly for examples and
>         demos, so
>         it can wait.

When you implement all this, you are basically left with a less portable, buggier(*) version of GLFW/GLUT. There's really no good reason to avoid GLFW - it follows the GL naming conventions, is lightweight, simple and to the point:

glfwInit();
/*               w    h  r  g  b  a   d  s  GLFW_WINDOW      */
glfwOpenWindow(640, 480, 8, 8, 8, 8, 16, 0, GLFW_FULLSCREEN);

while (glfwGetKey() != GLFW_KEY_ESC)	/* Callbacks supported too */
    glfwSleep(0.01);

glfwTerminate();

Which covers everything the sdk samples are going to need.

(*) Just look at the source code of GLFW. They work around several
win32/x11/osx bugs so that the library works the same everywhere.
Speaking from experience, this is no easy feat.