Hi All, I'm delighted to announce that as of today I'm now working on porting the OpenSceneGraph to work on OpenGL ES 2.0 ;-)
I'll be working on this through this month, and likely into November to tie up all the loose ends, and get the work integrated into svn/trunk and then into a stable release of the OpenSceneGraph. I have had to start this round of work immediately after completing other client work so haven't had a window opportunity to catch up with submissions and go for making 2.10 as I had originally hoped. If community members are keen to see a 2.10 release sooner rather than later then we'll need to rely upon other members of the community to take charge of a 2.10 branch and push it all the way to release without me at the helm. When might "later" be? If things go well then we could potentially have OpenGL ES 2.0 support into svn/trunk and ready for a stable release for the end of November. I'll be making a dev release prior to making the OpenGL ES branch, so perhaps this will suffice if you need a release to work against. If you want to help make 2.10 this month then please raise you hand and we can strike up a separate thread to look at the practicalities of making this happen without me at the helm. My plan for the OpenGL ES work itself will be to keep it as straight forward as I can, looking to minimize the number of API changes and implementation changes to the OSG code base. This approach will be key to progressing the task quickly and enabling the new code to be merged into svn/trunk early in the development cycle and to avoid disrupting the traditional OSG/OpenGL user base as much as possible. What I won't be attempting to do is provide sophisticated tools to mapping fixed function pipelines to shaders, or attempting the tackle the task of shader composition, this will mean that users will have to build a scene graph with osg::StateSet/osg::Program/osg::Uniform specifically for the OpenGL ES 2.0 target. In the past we've often discussed OpenGL 3.0 port in terms of how to do we handle the fixed function pipeline mapping and implementation shader composition, and this is something I still see as a long term goal, however, it's way to ambitious to be able to implement within the time constraints and without significant changes to the OpenSceneGraph. So I'm keeping my goals humble, and milestones within reach and by doing so make them the goal obtainable. Another key aspect of what I want to achieve is open the door for OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenGL 3.x support with a modest amount of additional effort above the OpenGL ES 2.0 port. I don't have the time or resources to tackle the port to these targets myself within the next few months, but I believe it should be possible to facilitate support for these targets with the appropriate approach to adding support to OpenGL ES 2.0, and given assistance of the community we may well be able to add support for these additional targets at the same time or shortly after the introduction of OpenGL ES 2.0 support. In fact I'm actually optimistic that the similarity between OpenGL ES 2.0, OpenGL 3.x w.r.t focus of shaders, and even OpenGL 2.x (if you ignore the fixed function pipeline) will enable us to test out OpenGL ES 2.0/OpenGL 3.0 style code paths even with out having one or both installed. If we get it right we may enable contributors working on OpenGL 2.x or OpenGL 3.x be able to help out the OpenGL ES 2.x port, and visa-versa. I won't delve too much into the implementation details right now, as I just have some preliminary designs down on paper and in my head, I really need to test a couple of different strategies out before I start committing to a specific approach. My intention is to settle on the final approach to OpenGL ES 2.0/OpenGL 3.x and OpenGL ES 1.1 in the next week or two, and will keep the community informed of progress. If you've already done your own porting work to either OpenGL ES 1.1, OpenGL ES 2.0 or OpenGL 3.x then please come forward with details, and ideally post some code and pass on what you've learned from the work so that we can roll this into what will finally make it into svn/trunk. Thanks in advance for you support, patience and wisdom, Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
