Hi Cory, On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Cory Riddell <[email protected]> wrote: >I don't understand how anybody can think being OS agnostic is > good, but renderer agnosticism is bad (ideologically). I do understand > however, that development resources are scarce and the programmers get > to work on whatever they want to work on.
Being rendering agnostic is not ideal in terms of providing a thin layer ontop of the underlying functionaliy, being rendering agnostic requires you to abstract the interface from the implementation and in doing so you loose the direct mapping which can help with both performance and exposing underlying features in a flexible and convenient way. The OSG has so far embraced the approach of this very close mapping between OpenGL and equivalent OSG structures right down to modes being direct pass through from osg::StateSet to OpenGL. By going rendering agnostic we loose this convenience and if we aren't careful performance with it. It's really hard to get a good rendering agnostic API that doesn't loose performance and drop features to ensure a common denominator between APIs. Being rendering agnostic is not free from cost, so it should be at all surprising that one might be very wary of going rendering API agnostic. Once you do embrace being rendering API agonostic you carry the overheads of this design approach for all time going forward, and unless you really do need multiple rendering API's at the backend that are going to be properly maintained they the costs of going agnostic are far higher than that of sticking with the thin layer that the OSG has right now. For us to make the move we have to ensure that we both have a design that will work well, and we have the resources to implement it and maintain it going forward. We also have to make sure that we can carry the existing community with us on this journey. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
