OpenGLUT Project

0.6.3 development

OpenGLUT - An open source evolution of the GLUT API.

Offscreen rendering to a texture using OpenGLUT

Introduction

OpenGLUT is an open source project to evolve the GLUT (OpenGL Utility Toolkit) C/C++ API. OpenGLUT uses the freeglut code base as a foundation for extending, enhancing and refining the API.

The current focus of the project is fixing bugs and improving cross-platform support.

Our longer term goal is to define and implement OpenGLUT API Version 1.0 - intended to supercede the GLUT 3.x API.

Motivation

• GLUT is a popular, portable and well documented API
• Learning GLUT is easy for beginners
• Mark Kilgard's GLUT implementation has known bugs/features/limitations
• Mark Kilgard's GLUT implementation is not actively maintained and is not available as open source
• There are areas of the GLUT that can be improved
• Interactive 3D graphics is rapidly evolving

Part of the GLUT family

• GLUT by Mark Kilgard, originally implemented on SGI systems, later ported to Win32 by Nate Robins
• freeglut by Pawel W. Olszta and others, a compatible open source implementation of GLUT
• OpenGLUT a mostly-compatible open source implementation of GLUT with new features and refinements

Features

Some changes since forking from freeglut include:

• Improved full-screen support
• Improved joystick support
• Improved Cygwin and Mingw32 support
• Improved bitmap font rendering
• Improved ANSI-C compliance
• Documentation refinements
• Experimental offscreen rendering

Current proposals for OpenGLUT 1.0

• OpenGLUT Input API Proposal
• OpenGLUT Device API Proposal
• OpenGLUT Image Loading API Proposal
• OpenGLUT glutVisibilityFunc Proposal
• OpenGLUT Window Close API Proposal
• OpenGLUT Init Window Style Proposal
• OpenGLUT Menu Window Proposal
• OpenGLUT Borderless Window Proposal
• OpenGLUT Shaped Window Proposal
• OpenGLUT Text Rendering API Proposal
• OpenGLUT Unicode API Proposal

Other ideas being considered

• Fullscreen and game-mode API: rationalisation
• Extended geometric API: beyond the box, sphere and teapot
• Image loading API (for textures).
• Text Rendering API: scalable, textured fonts in model space.
• OpenGL extensions API

Experimental menu window using OpenGLUT

Using OpenGLUT

Documentation

Detailed API and example documentation is available online or as a download in HTML and man-page formats.

Download

The latest development version of OpenGLUT is available via SourceForge.

Developers

The current development version of OpenGLUT is source-compatible with the GLUT API, but not binary-compatible.

Compatibility of OpenGLUT 1.0 with GLUT 3.x has not yet been decided.

The motivation for the OpenGLUT API is to make OpenGL based development easy, productive and reliable. We would welcome feedback in relation to API proposals, results with using OpenGLUT in applications, and feature requests or proposals. There may well be functionality in your own application that could serve a broader long-term purpose.

Bugs, Feature Requests, Mail Lists and Forums

Please visit the OpenGLUT SourceForge Interface for bug reporting, feature requests/suggestions, mailing lists or discussion forums.

CVS

The current source code repository is available via CVS at SourceForge.

A CVS web interface is also available, including diff, annotation and log viewing functions.

A nightly CVS tarball is also available.

Generated on Sat Feb 5 01:47:18 2005 for OpenGLUT by doxygen 1.3.9.1
The OpenGLUT project is hosted by sourceforge.net.