News

Big Nerd Ranch is offering an iPhone Bootcamp which includes dealing with drawing using Core Graphics, Core Animation, and OpenGL. iPhone Bootcamp is designed for developers who want to write applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Pre-requisites for the course are good knowledge of C and one object-oriented language. There are five courses being offered from October through February 2009. Complete details can be found on the event page.

S3 Graphics and Graphic Remedy, an innovative provider of OpenGL performance tools announced the support of the latest Chrome 400 Series GPUs with the gDEBugger performance measurement utility. The Chrome 400 Series GPUs support the latest OpenGL 2.1 API and hardware HD video decode for Blu-ray™ playback.

The first release of SIO2 is now available, using OpenGL ES as the drawing API. Written in pure C using a bit of obj-c & C++ to glue things together, SIO2 is a light and flexible 3D engine for the next generation of mobile devices. This first release includes everything required to get started: realtime physic (Bullet) realtime MP3 (.ogg) using OpenAL & MPEG4 playback (.ogv) world editor WYSIWYG (Blender) scripting language (LUA) exporter, realtime lighting accelerometer & multi-touch support as well as many other features. It is build around the official iPhone SDK (2.0 and up) for Mac OS X. Video tutorials, code samples, documentations, forums etc, are available to help you create your own 3D applications for iPhone & iPod Touch. A video showing some of the features is available on YouTube.

The GLee extension library has added support for OpenGL 3.0. GLee takes the pain out of managing OpenGL extensions and core functions. It’s compatible with Windows, OS X and many unix variants, including Linux. In addition to OpenGL 3.0 support, version 3.0 adds 36 new extensions, bringing the total to 398.

OpenGL based AsdGraph3D Excel Addin v1.3.0 adds dockable graph legends and multi-lined graph title, as well as two critical bug fixes.

The new Horde3D Beta2 release contains many bugfixes and smaller updates reported and contributed by the community. Besides these, it brings some noticeable improvements like increased shadow quality and extended occlusion culling. A further important enhancement is the expanded support for dynamic resource updates. On the Collada side, the compatibility was improved by supporting non-baked animation data. Finally, the previous makefile system has been replaced by CMake-based build scripts.

S2PLOT, an OpenGL-based library for advanced three-dimensional plotting, version 2.4 is released. Support for standard and enhanced (3D and stereoscopic) display devices. This is an intermediate release offering a range of new features, as well as some important system changes. New features include: a new open source S2PLOT application - s2anim - for displaying time-series of point-like data functions to draw wireframe and transparent solid cubes functions to draw textured spheres with control over the orientation of the texture In total 23 new functions have been added The architectural changes are more significant than feature additions in version 2.4, as they are necessitated by the forthcoming Open Source release of S2PLOT.

The TimeCube is quite a useless program - but nice to look at! It displays a transparent rotating cube which displays the current time and date. The cube is rendered offscreen using OpenGL 2.0 with shaders, cube map reflection, specular lighting, bumpmapping. All the bells and whistles. Eight different shaders are compiled in, and the best looking one will automatically be chosen to suite your graphics card.

Mark Kilgard explains the latest DirectX 10-class features of OpenGL supported by the GeForce 8, 9, and 28x series of NVIDIA GPUs. Much of this functionality is already part of OpenGL 3.0. Also learn about the EXT_direct_state_access extension for selector-free access to OpenGL objects.

The Irrlicht dev team is happy to announce the release of Irrlicht version 1.4.2 of their open source, high performance, realtime, cross-platform 3D engine, written and usable in C++. This is a bugfix update of the 1.4 series, fixing the OpenGL SW render fallback problem of 1.4.1. But it also provides several other bugfixes and enhancements, such as: Unified handling of the zwrite enable flag for transparent materials for compatibility with older Irrlicht versions. There are now functions in the scenemanager to enable/disable ZWrite flags of transparent materials. Improvements of the file loaders, OpenGL renderer, memory usage Optimization of the skeletal animation rendering code See changes.txt in the SDK for details. Download Irrlicht now

SGI has posted a new advanced OpenGL course for October 2008. The Advanced OpenGL Programming course is intended for software professionals and students who already have experience with OpenGL programming and want to learn advanced concepts.

The new gDEBugger V4.3 adds in-depth analysis of the OpenGL usage by tracking redundant state changes and detailed usage statistics. This new feature includes various capabilities, such as noting unrecommended OpenGL functions (with a detailed explanation of why are they unrecommended and possible alternatives) and in-depth information about the usage of OpenGL State Change functions, including redundancy percentages and amount of redundant / effective calls. The S3 Graphics performance counters integration is also introduced in this version. This powerful integration works on all S3 Graphics hardware, giving very detailed information of the hardware utilization to allow optimizing the OpenGL usage on S3 Graphics hardware using gDEBugger. gDEBugger, an OpenGL and OpenGL ES debugger and profiler, traces application activity on top of the OpenGL API, lets programmers see what is happening within the graphic system implementation to find bugs and optimize OpenGL application performance.

Adobe announced CS4 on September 23rd with a new round of updates for their design suites. A notable addition to Photoshop and After Effects is the addition of support for OpenGL. After Effects CS4 Professional now has OpenGL high-fidelity support for blending modes, adjustment layers, track mattes, accelerated effects, anti-aliasing, 2D motion blur, lights, and shadows. In Photoshop Extended, the entire 3D engine has been migrated from a PDF-based architecture to OpenGL, and the company has seeded OpenGL support throughout the application. Standard users will also see small advantages with OpenGL which is used to quickly zoom around large images. Read more on OpenGL support in Photoshop CS4, which is due out near the end of October.

Mesa is a free and open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification. Mesa 7.2 is a stable release fixing bugs found in 7.1, which was a new development release. New features include: autoconf-based configuration, assorted DRI driver enhancements, reduced dependencies between X server and Mesa, GL_EXT_texture_from_pixmap extension for Xlib driver, support for the GL shading language with i965 driver, and ATI R500 series support. Mesa 7.2 implements the OpenGL 2.1 API.

Michael Gold at NVIDIA explained the APIs for CUDA and OpenGL interoperability at NVISION 2008. Learn how to mix OpenGL and CUDA in a single application.