[Opengc-devel] status update

[Damion S. <be...@cs...>]

Hi, a quick update on where I'm at with the proposed rewrite...

I spent last weekend upgrading my sim and glass cockpit computers (it's 
amazing what $550 will buy you these days), so I have not made a lot of 
progress on coding. This should greatly speed up compilation on the 
glass cockpit machine, so hopefully the time spent on the upgrade will 
be worth it.

One thing I would like to toss out is the idea of abstracting OpenGC 
away from a particular windowing toolkit. As I've looked into modeling 
OpenGC more after the Visualization Toolkit (VTK, http://www.vtk.org ) 
it's occurred to me that we could fairly easily adopt their rendering 
model as well. VTK implements its own native OpenGL contexts for 3 
general classes of machine (Windows, X11, and Mac), and then provides 
hooks so that these can be easily packaged into larger applications. 
For instance, you can choose to embed the window in FLTK, Windows (via 
the Microsoft Foundation Classes), Tcl/Tk, Java, etc. In fact, with 
suitable code wrapping (also from VTK) it should be possible to use 
OpenGC windows and gauges as objects within other languages, which 
would be great for people who are interested in writing a custom app 
with OpenGC but don't know C++.

This would increase the complexity of the code within OpenGC 
_slightly_, though the VTK license permits use of that code without 
restriction so porting should not be a huge deal. It's unlikely that 
gauge-oriented developers would notice much of a change, since this is 
all fairly low-level stuff. The major advantage I can see this 
providing is that the final "application" could be more easily tailored 
to a specific purpose; i.e., if you want to create an elaborate GUI in 
Windows, you don't have to rewrite anything. Similarly, if you want a 
completely bare-bones application running under X, you don't have to 
drag along the baggage of a more complex windowing system.

Feedback is of course welcome. Of course, for the average end user, I 
still plan to release something similar to what we have now that will 
let you configure a gauge layout in a text file.

Cheers,
-Damion-

---------
Damion Shelton
The Open Source Glass Cockpit Project (OpenGC)
Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute
http://www.opengc.org
da...@op...