News

Graphcomp has released Perl OpenGL (POGL) 0.56, adding support for Cg and GLSL. In parallel, Graphcomp has also released the OpenGL::Shader module, which abstracts OpenGL APIs for ARB (assembly), Cg and GLSL shading languages. POGL Developer’s Site

The Embedded Systems 3D Game Software Development Kit, short ES 3D Game SDK, is an Open Source 3D Game Engine / SDK for embedded devices / mobile phones. The new v0.4.1 includes hardware and simulated lighting for the terrain renderer. Also, several improvements and bug fixes are included in this release. The SDK is tested against the OpenGL ES library from Hybrid Graphics (Rasteroid 3.1), Imagination Technologies (PowerVR) and Nokia (OpenGL ES 1.1 Plugin). For OpenKODE, the Acrodea SDK is used and tested.

This blog entry outlines some basic information to get up to speed with the development of a basic table tennis game using OpenGL.

Lightlab is a hybrid GTK/OpenGL program for experimenting with the OpenGL lighting model. This program lets you set the colors and positions of three GTK light sources, and watch the effect that has on a simple 3D scene. You can select whether the scene contains a rotating cube, sphere, or teapot, and whether that object has a texture image on its surface.

A racing game played with marbles on tracks made of sand. The game mimics a traditional game played with plastic or wooden marbles on Mediterranean beaches. Players flick or hit the marbles trying to complete the track in the least numbers of shots. Rollick has been developed with a version of the Torque Game Engine heavily modified to exploit the power of OpenGL 2.0 shaders and vertex buffer objects.

AllegroGL is an Allegro add-on that allows you to use OpenGL alongside Allegro—you use OpenGL for your rendering to the screen, and Allegro for miscellaneous tasks like gathering input, doing timers, getting cross-platform portability, loading data, and drawing your textures. So this library fills the same hole that things like glut do. AllegroGL also automatically exposes most, if not all, OpenGL extensions available to user programs. This means you no longer have to manually load them; extension management is already done for you.

Papervision3D is an open source 3D engine for the Flash platform that utilizes COLLADA. The creators of Papervision3D have finally been able to sit down and merge a lot of code and clean up some major work under the hood with Papervision3D! This version of the engine has seen a 40% plus increase in speed! The API didn’t change a bit, and we added some new features like culling and InteractiveScene3D with Interactive materials. The CS3 Papervision3D component was also updated today. 

The ThinkPad T60p Widescreen is Lenovo’s first wide-screen corporate laptop with workstation graphics. Its 256MB ATI Mobility FireGL V5250 graphics chip is optimised for OpenGL, the programming environment of choice for many big-name game developers and other 3D-modeling professionals. Pricing, reviews and additional information can be found at Amazon.

The Mac OS X Resolution Independence Utilities project is a Google Code project where utilities and code will be available for creating high- or multi-resolution imagery. This is labelled “Mac OS X” - code for Carbon, Java, X11 and OpenGL is welcome too (even though, for example, Java has an integer-based coordinate system). For contributions, the BSD license or more allowing licenses (like the MIT license or public domain) is required. The Google Code project can be found here.

Lamina is a tool to facilitate displaying SDL raster displays in OpenGL displays. A Lamina object (there are a couple of different flavors… read the docstrings) has a surface attribute, and a display method.  Write to the surface attribute using any old pygame draw routine, or pass the surface attribute to your GUI library, refresh() it, and then call the display method from your OpenGL display code. This version uses partial texture updates, only updating the areas within a ‘dirty rectangle’ list.  Pygame sprite functionality and GUIs return ‘dirty rectangle’ lists as part of their functionality.  These partial updates are faster than complete regenerations, and the demo folder includes a comparitive timing script. This release also adds a demo (pyg_lam.py) with no ‘extra’ dependencies, no dependencies beyond python standard dist, pyopengl, and pygame.  You can try it out without installing a GUI.

Providing scalable high performance low power 3D graphics cores to the embedded space for handheld devices, mobile phones, vehicle navigation systems, amusement game consoles and other embedded graphics applications, DMP has adopted the Open Core Protocol as the standard bus interface for their components.

OpenGL-based ActiveSolid 2.5.2 freeware is released with online Internet Exploer Plugin demo and adds new Trim tool for trimming a 3D mesh with a half space defined by an arbitrary plane, plus several bug fixes.

This new demo shows non-photorealistic rendering of 3D scenes using GLSL shaders. There are three kinds of non-photorealistic rendering in this demo: Cartoon shading, pencil shading and ink shading. The cartoon shading mode uses cel shading to give the scene the look of a cartoon. In all three modes, edges are drawn as a post-processing effect using a Laplace edge detection shader. To simulate the shaking hand of an artist, the edges and colors are distorted with a Perlin noise texture. The shadows are generated using shadow mapping. In the pencil and ink shading modes, the shadows are combined with a hatch texture. The demo also features bone animation and some simple AI. As an extra, the demo supports left/right stereo-projections.

Digital imaging software for movie playback, image processing, and monitor calibration. Features include support for extended range images, industry standard file formats, and versions for UNIX and Windows. Highlights for this release include a new OpenGL based imaging pipeline and improved image I/O performance.

AGE is a 3D software development kit for Windows for developing graphicals applications with multithread support built on top of the OpenGL or Direct3D API. It offers automatic resource management, a scene graph support and an highly configurable 3D GUI. Age3D is pleased to show a video introducing some of the new functionalities provided by Age3D interface graphic system. The video shows how it is possible to use GUI’s elements in 3D space and to interact with them just like any other 3D scene object. It allows to create innovative applications where the interactive experience is limited only by your imagination.