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Posted by Larry Martin on November 03, 1997 at 12:18:11:
In Reply to: Stability posted by Ken Kuhlman on November 01, 1997 at 09:37:01:
Ken,
I agree, DesignWorkshop on OS8 is incredibally stable. I have been trying to push it past its limits but have failed;-)
Anyway, MacCentral has been following the scoop with OpenGL and I noticed this posting just this weekend and thought you find it of some interest.
A followup to OpenGL
[D.Sellers] - MacCentral readers sent in some interesting comments on two of this week's news stories. Marcus Bointon felt we missed a few points in our Oct. 29 article on Conix's OpenGL technology.
"The reason that Apple developed QuickDraw 3D is that OpenGL is, in many ways, simply not very good. It is very hard to extend. If it doesn't know how to do something, there's no way of simply extending it. For example, it doesn't support geometry or rendering plug-ins. It's also a preview-only solution, and does not support high quality output. It's not object oriented, though there is OpenInventor from SGI which adds an OO layer to OpenGL, but, of course, that's for the SGI platform only. QD3D is completely object oriented, and is easily extended. Note the growing number of rendering solutions, such as those from ThinkFish and LightWorks. QD3D accelerators can be used for OpenGL acceleration, and to a limited extent the reverse is also true.
"OpenGL could easily be supported by QD3D (perhaps through Conix' own library), as it is a large superset of OpenGL. Before the recent SIGGraph show, there were many rumors about QD3D 2.0 offering full support for OpenGL, and being ready to ship, but this was apparently pulled by the ever forward-thinking Apple Marketing people..."
Martin, Bill & the Sigma 4 gang says our story on OpenGL has a few problems. They write:
"1. The QD3D team was reduced because QD3D is pretty much complete. With the release of 1.5.3 almost all outstanding issues have been addressed.
"2. Open GL is NOT a replacement, indeed it will sit UNDERNEATH QD3D quite nicely as a rendering engine. Like most junk that originates from the Unix world it is NOT a complete solution, but only part of one. It's almost exactly analogous to the Lightworks renderer (which we're using and are very pleased with)."