Re: fltk and GL (WAS: Unix/Win GUI re-evaluation)

[Stan Shebs <shebs@cygnus.com>]

   Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 10:32:41 +1000 (GMT+1000)
   From: Andrae Muys <a.muys@mailbox.uq.edu.au>

   Now while I don't know how GLX works (remote displayed GL on X11), if you
   are using locally hosted OpenGL, my understanding was that it just
   obtained a window and a mask from the X server and rendered directly to
   the hardware (or at least the frame buffer for software rendered).  Please
   correct me if I'm wrong, but this was always how I understood it to work.

Actually, this turns out to be a rather complicated topic!  The
executive summary is that you're basically right, OpenGL skips by X.
For Mesa, GLX, and Xfree86 4.0, there is a plan to do something that
gets X to cooperate if necessary, but can bypass it also if necessary.
Right now there are prototypes that Linux wizzes could bolt into their
kernels, and some work on 3D card drivers also, and it looks like a
lot of this will be standard for Linux in a year or two (not least
because Carmack wants people to run Quake under Linux...).  There is a
lot of interesting stuff under mesa3d.org.

Getting back to Xconq, this whole area is something I'd like to get
somebody else to work on right now.  If somebody can cobble together a
2D OpenGL display of an Xconq map, and show that it runs reasonably
fast on vanilla hardware, I'll be keen to get a closer look at it.

							Stan