Re: [Plib-users] plib, Scene Graphs and Demeter

[Mike S. <st...@sh...>]

Steve, thanks for your very interesting reply.

You made a very interesting point, regarding PLIB supporting terrain 
rendering. I have played around with the majik demo, and I was impressed. 
Have you tried incorporating the Demeter engine into PLIB? The beauty of 
Demeter for me is that it's essentially a "load-and-forget" library, taking 
just a few lines of code to load in and display terrain.

Thanks again
Mike

On Friday 29 March 2002 9:50 am, Steve Baker wrote:
> mi...@st... wrote:
> > I'm looking for a scene graph library to use with the Demeter terrain
> > engine. One option is plib, using either its simple scene graph (ssg), or
> > something like Open Scene Graph.
> >
> > How would these all work together? I'm sure I read somewhere that they
> > could work together, with plib providing the OpenGL basics (i.e. window)
> > and mouse and keyboard input, but how would I use ssg to insert and
> > manipulate 3d modules?
>
> PLIB doesn't cover window opening/resizing/whatever and it doesn't support
> mouse/keyboard input - most PLIB users use GLUT (or something similar) to
> do that.  However, I think SSG would be a good library to help out with
> rendering whatever your terrain engine generates.
>
> SSG handles the nastiness of culling to the view frustum and optimising
> state changes - it also makes it easy to do things like adding man-made
> structures like buildings, bridges, etc by loading them from one of a
> dozen or so external file formats.
>
> Open Scene Graph is another reasonable choice for that - it has similar
> functionality to SSG but with a slightly different slant.  SSG is focussed
> on realtime performance and also allows you fairly free access to OpenGL
> functionality.  OpenSG is driven by a very strict view of 'correctness'
> and (as I'm told) doesn't perform as quickly as a result.  It also doesn't
> allow you access to OpenGL with things like callback functions.  If OpenSG
> doesn't provide everything you need, you are screwed - with SSG, it's
> usually possible to work around any limitations with callback functions or
> by deriving new classes from those that SSG provides.
>
> SSG is currently used by the FlightGear flight simulator - so you know it
> can render terrain nicely.  Also, I come from a flight simulation
> background, so you can expect that my design for SSG is well suited to
> terrain rendering. OpenSG's main thrust has been towards the rendering of
> CAD models for the car industry and other similar applications.
>
> So, I believe that SSG would be a better choice than OpenSG.  But of course
> I'm biassed.  This is the wonderful world of OpenSource where projects like
> OpenSG and PLIB can co-exist and not feel the need to compete! There may
> well be specific features of OpenSG that you may need for your application
> that would make it a better choice than SSG.
>
> ----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
> Mail : <sjb...@ai...>   WorkMail: <sj...@li...>
> URLs : http://www.sjbaker.org
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