On 8/28/06, Leif Delgass <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There are very useful during the transitional period of moving from fixed function to full programmable pipeline, so its frustrating that they arn't supported better.
I've found the fixed-function uniforms to be one of the more fragile
aspects of GLSL as far as driver support goes. It's too bad since
they are useful for maintaining fixed-function fallback paths for
something like shadow mapping.
There are very useful during the transitional period of moving from fixed function to full programmable pipeline, so its frustrating that they arn't supported better.
However, it seems that the IHVs are
pushing to get rid of them altogether in the OpenGL 3 lean and mean
profile, a la OpenGL ES shading language. If you look at the ES
shading language spec on the Khronos site, you'll see a strikethough
on all but the most fundamental builtins beginning with gl_.
I think this actually a positive thing, OpenGL needs to get smaller, so that the drivers can be smaller, faster and easier to maintain. As we've all witnessed many times, OpenGL driver bug are the bane of our lives, it only needs one small thing to go wrong and our apps stop working properly and we end up having to workaround them rather getting on with our real work. Smaller, simpler OpenGL drivers should end up being more robust.
Making OpenGL smaller does mean that middleware will have to take up the slack in missing functionality, so that the end user applications still get the functionality they require. However, since open source middleware is taking an increasing role in graphics app development, we actually will see a net increase in what open source software contributes to - this is a good thing, proprietary OpenGL drivers do less, while open source middleware does more - we can't maintain proprietary OpenGL drivers oursleves, but we *can* maintain open source middleware ourselves so we should a gain in our ability to maintain robust applications.
Robert.
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