Hear, hear! Setting OpenGL 2.1 as a foundation gives us a large feature set to work with, reducing our reliance on extensions that might or might not be available at run time. For example VBOs and GLSL 1.2 are *guaranteed* to be there so we won't need conditional checks or ARB suffixes for those functions/enums.
When would be an appropriate time to require 2.1? As in refuse to run if less than this? I have a growing list of still-nice-to-have extensions that have not been adopted into core OpenGL as of 2.1. Half the list is on this machine and the rest on Windows -- I'll put together a full post on this topic soon. Mike Erwin musician, naturalist, pixel pusher, hacker extraordinaire On Tue, Dec 30, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello again, > > The times of fixed function OpenGL pipeline have been very fun and > happy, with coders trying to ingeniously hack the fixed function > parameters to do the things they wanted. > > But I believe we are getting to the point where fixed function OpenGL > starts holding us back. We already require GLSL support for some of > the fancier features of blender, but probably it's time to feel free > to consider shaders as the primary display mechanism if we want to, > without needing to code fallbacks to a fixed function alternative. > > Especially anything that requires mixing multiple textures (such as > texture painting with masks or brush overlays) or attributes in a non > standard way is difficult without shaders. > > This is scheduled to happen as part of the viewport refactor, but > having the hardware requirements there will enable us to do more > improvements now. > > The proposal is not about throw away every legacy path next release, > rather than assuming that users will need to have access to newer > hardware from now on if they wish to access core features. Shader > availability can be tested to avoid crashes but no alternative > rendering path should be provided for those not meeting the > requirements. > _______________________________________________ > Bf-committers mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers > _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
