Submitted by “Nine months ago the Khronos Group released the specification to OpenGL 3.0. OpenGL 3.0 brought version 1.30 of the GL Shading Language, the introduction of Vertex Array Objects, texture arrays, more flexible frame-buffer objects, and a number of other graphical features. What OpenGL 3.0 didn’t bring was a major API revision that many developers had expected, and it was also arrived many months late. Today though, Khronos has announced OpenGL 3.1.”
It should be noted that a few hours after publishing the specs, NVIDIA has released drivers that support OpenGL 3.1 (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris) http://developer.nvidia.com/object/opengl_3_driver.html#dl
The more interesting bit of news on the announcement was this:
The link in that announcement then leads to an even more interesting bit of news:
Eat your heart out DirectXXX!
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Edited 2009-03-25 13:46 UTC
If, and only if, this can somehow be supported in IE as well. Otherwise, it’s going to be yet another useful feature available in everything except IE, which is therefore nearly useless.
Maybe something like the ActiveX plug-in implementation of Firefox’s Canvas element would work? Maybe a “make IE work correctly” plugin, to add support for 2D- and 3D- drawing, video and audio, and all the other neat stuff Microsoft will probably never implement.
1999 called. They want IE’s 95% market share back. IE has sixty-some-odd percent of market share these days.
Edited 2009-03-25 15:48 UTC
No difference. Would you want to create a website that doesn’t work for 60% of web users? Unless your site is targeted exclusively at Linux/Mac users, or is a pure hobby site, IE still needs to be supported.
Depends on the site. For many sites, it would be quite acceptable to make the page itself viewable with IE, minus the 3D content, and then slap a “Best viewed with Mozilla Firefox! (You get to see the 3D.)” link at the bottom leading to getfirefox.com. Sure, it would be better if IE were < 50%. But there is, indeed, a substantial practical difference between < 60% IE market share and > 95% IE market share. If MS ends up dragged into supporting a standard because other browsers support it, I call it a win for everyone.
Edited 2009-03-25 16:22 UTC
Well if Microsoft wants to pooh-pooh it let them. I would like to see cross-platform online gaming become a reality. Enough with heavy gaming clients that are Windoze only!
With Google heavily backing it, I could care less about Microshaft!
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As far as I am concerned, adding 3D support in the browser is a bad idea. It’s just going to add even more complexity to a browser, like they weren’t already enough vulnerables. Anyway, ECMAscript won’t bring “heavy gaming clients” in your browser…
Personally, I believe pushing OpenGL in Java would be a better idea. There are already some JNIs to OpenGL, the Java VM isn’t a vulnerability fest, it would be faster than interpreting ECMAscript and Java is available on many platforms. Why are they reinventing the wheel? Oh well.
Edited 2009-03-25 22:28 UTC
I fully agree. How many programs require installation of the .NET framework? Plenty (as a non-Windows user I got dragged through that hell running Windows in a VM). A Firefox download for Windows is, what? 7 MB? The big difference between .NET or ActiveX is of course that Firefox works on nearly every non-mobile platform.
It could be an opportunity to get even more market share Microsoft-style. But this time it is cross-platform FLOSS software.
Thatll be great to leverage. However, give me the new API and it’s Object Model which has been the biggest gripe by the community so we can now silence their complaints and move forward.
It kinda sucks that the Khronos Group seem to tackle any issue they encounter, except that one. I wouldn’t be surprised if the object model doesn’t ever see the light of the day because of some influent vendor that doesn’t want to update its codebase.
Hell, I wouldn’t even think about giving a try to DirectX if they had released the original Longs Peak proposal. I dislike proprietary standards, but at least DirectX is going forward…