On Tuesday, August 5, 2003, at 05:23 pm, Curtis L. Olson wrote:
At the risk of tainting the discussion I will say that from my investigation, "Open Scene Graph" seems to be the better choice. There are people here locally that use it, and I know that other flightgear developers have used it as well. It seems to support all the platforms that we currently support. No one I've talked to seems to know much about OpenSG and the one web link I found (http://sgi.felk.cvut.cz/~pavlicm/Dipl/sw.htm) seems to put Open Scene Graph ahead in terms of performance (based on a single test which doesn't say too much actually.)
OpenSceneGraph looks much better than I remember, but it's also worth looking at OGRE, which is being (very) actively developed.
http://ogre.sf.net/
Is the place to start. Note that OGRE is a bit more 'gamey' than the other systems mentioned, notably it supports DirectX in addition to OpenGL. I'm not really sure if being more game-orientated would be considered a bonus or not for FlightGear.
Also, I'm far more concerned about getting rid of PLIB / GLUT for our OS interaction, than the graphical shortcomings of SSG. There are a couple of obvious replacements: SDL, SDL, or just possibly, SDL.
:-)
This would remove various limitations on joysticks (SDL supports hats), number of sound channels (SDL has a mixer), video mode-switching (SDL knows how to make X do that, quite apart from on Win32 or OS-X)
Perhaps most importantly, SDL gives the application back it's event loop.
Oh, and the the OpenSceneGraph FAQ lists SDL as a candidate rendering layer, for people who're finding GLUT a pain.
Of course switching both the scene graph and the OS-abstraction at the same time would be silly : one could either switch to SDL, and initially retain SSG, or alternatively, try and get OpenSceneGraph working alongside the rest of PLIB. Not sure which makes more sense.
All my opinion, naturally. James
-- They are laughing with me, not at me.
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