OpenGL 2.0

#1 Excellent, and yes gg had been waiting on the specs.

#2 I hope garagegames doesn't jump into OpenGL development right away, I would hope they would get some of the other kinks out before they dive into something into OpenGL.

#3 @Tim: That's you, but Torque is a crossplatform engine and there's lots of people out there waiting for the OpenGL support in TSE. I think it's a top priority actually before the rest of the nice stuff, like lighting, shadows, shader building tools, etc.

#4 I'd prefer to see TSE at its current state on all supported OS's. That way, any enhancements can be tested fully everywhere.

#5 I agree, that way I can play with it on my iMac g5 :)

#6 Yep - what everyone says. GL before anything else

#7 We can disagree thats fine, but there are quite of unresolved things that will get put off, and nobody will be able to use it for anything. Sure I'm a bit partial to the Windows side of things, but it's like adding rims to a junky car. I don't mean that to slam TSE, just as an anagoly. Now when something breaks you'll have to track it down in multiple places, maybe change other functionality, now we will all get something thats 65% done, but hey it will run on mac/linux. When 90+% of the gamers have windows machines as their gaming machine.

#8 ...

#9 Don't forget to take into account whatever the staffing allocations may be. If separate developers are working on the OpenGL 2.0 implementation, it doesn't necessarily slow down those fixing old bugs.

And for that matter, we the registered developers have the source code. We are *all* maintainers. ;-) At least that's how I view myself, new to Torque as I may be.

That said, I view OpenGL 2.0 support as a priority. Cross-platform graphics that can take full advantage of the latest hardware will definitely be huge benefit.

#10 @Tim, Those comments IMO are very selfish and very uncalled for, not to mention not based upon facts. Think this through tim, windows isn't the only platform on the earth. A load of the people here at GG use macs and linux, why would GG want to write them off like that? As for putting things aside, OGL 2.0 IS VERY VERY VERY HIGH ON THE PRIORITY LIST. For a number of reasons. A few being that its cross-platform, more powerful, faster, better, smoother, and alot better all around IMO. Plus the fact that GG will reach more people faster. In an on-demand world (as it in now) speed is money. I personally am waiting on the released product of TSE so i can upgrade my game/editor and ship it off to a publisher. I cannot do that without Cross-platform ability. This is just my view on OGL 2.0 if you dun care about it, then tough. (I dun mean to be rude, but I know for a fact atleast 50% of the 'active developers' here use Linux.)

#11 I for one would never even consider purchasing TSE unless it was crossplatform.

Also, while 90+% of the games market may be PC when we're talking the Doom 3/Far Cry type market, once we start talking independent games the playing field levels quite a bit.

#12 From what I understand they're not implementing OpenGL into TSE untill they complete the features in Windows. That way they have less code to rewrite. At least thats what Ben Garney said in June, so things could of changed since then.

#13 Damn I guess, I didn't intend to start a flame war between windows and mac or whatever. I wasn't thinking TSE would have to be finished before OpenGL was put in. Just things like water, particles, vehicles, just more of the stuff thats missing from TGE, but it doesn't matter you're right I do have the source, and I don't really care about the other features like lighting and shadows and stuff, cuz we are going to be replacing all that stuff anyways. Everyone gets all touchy when the Windows comparisons pop up, if you had TSE as is on the mac/linux you wouldn't ship tomorrow. It would be cool I do admit if more people could use it, and it would progress faster, that would be nice. I'm going to go into specifics about comparing API's, and I wouldn't want to put out any numbers on games that sell in the stores against other games that are cross platform.

I would like to see the day that Windows is second fiddle, and it's Windows ports after Linux first, I don't care for the dominating Windows preference in this world, but I can't see that changing anytime soon. I know there are extremely good users on here that use Linux/Mac, I know some personally in my travels, I not bashing anybody, nor did I have plans to offend anyone. For what it's worth I wasn't rude to anyone, and I don't intend to get any arguments in here, so I'm done in this thread. Also keep in mind, my profile is lame, and don't treat me as a lamer because of it, I just rather not give anything in my profile, so don't judge me if I'm listed as a gamer, while I do like to play games, I love to make them more.

I'm in Far Cry type market, long projects like 1-2 years, not the 4 or 5 of others. I guess thats the difference, I do think in the future Torque/TSE will rise up and be mainstream, and will kick ass, I think Garage Games will change the industry in a few years, instead of developers spending million dollars on a engine, it's totally out of control, it's why companies such as EA, and Activision and others are dominating because the little guys can't get the funding, and can't afford the best technology, and don't get the time to make it themselves. I just hope that Garage Games doesn't wake up one day and charge a million dollars per license or whatever, as TSE matures, and gets further along it will be extremely hard for the big boys to get away with the crazy licensing costs.

#14 We're waiting for our internal graphics API to stabilize and for OGL2 to be out before we really do much in the way of writing the OGL layer. We're getting pretty close.

And, sheesh, if you need it so badly, there's nothing stopping you from writing your own GFX implementation and platform layer... :) If you're a good Mac/GL programmer, for instance, it should be a few weeks work to get something up and running.

#15 Is there such a big difference in the infrastructure between OpenGL 2.0 and 1.5? It doesn't seem like that much of an upgrade apart from a lot of existing extentions and GLSL moved into the core.

#16 Exactly. We want to see where the IHVs are going before we invest a lot of effort implementing support for extensions/core features that might not get supported/implemented.

#17 Not to mention, with the differences between OGL and DX becoming more and more about API design/platforms/naming schemes, and less about how they interact with the hardware, there's really no point in implementing another API at this point. Once TSE is mostly complete in DX, the hardest part about porting it to OGL2.0 will be rewriting the shaders.

#18 Please have some faith that we will put in OpenGL support when the time is right. If we had OpenGL 2.0 support in *right now* nobody would be able to use it because the drivers don't support it yet. We'd be trying to debug things on beta drivers. If we had OpenGL support in right now, using 1.5, we'd have to change/upgrade to 2.0...we are doing things this way for a reason.

We opened up the Early Adopter TSE, not because we think that it's ready for prime-time, but because we want people to see, and be involved in the development of this technology. Does this mean that you shouldn't pay attention to, or consider TSE? Heck no! I know at *least* 3 on-the-radar titles right off the top of my head right now that are using TSE which WILL ship.

#19 Erh, you have that completely backward : more than one coder has implemented HLSL loaders for OpenGL, matter of fact, Cg is very close to doing just that :)
So, no, it's really not just about rewriting the shaders. Plus, shaders are load time generated in TSE, but since you're not a licensee of either TGE or TSE, you might not be aware of this, although looking at the demo content's makes it fairly obvious :)

It's about abstracting the particularities of one API to work with TSE's GFX layer, so that you only need to worry about GFX's assumptions, and not that OGL and D3D don't use the same kind of coordinates frame layout (OGL is right handed, D3D is left handed, plus OGL has peculiarities in how it stores its matrices in memory. Maths really don't care about this at all, but the code we write usually makes such assumptions), and other interesting quirks of those two APIs.

That said, the spec for OGL 2.0 is out, the OGL 1.5 spec has been out for a long time, and both ati and nvidia have an excellent track record of conformance to the OGL ARB.
eg OGL 2.0 drivers will conform to the spec.

But the important point here is this : GFX is still in flux, and since the devs have a working DX9 backend to work with, we shouldn't be asking of them to make more backends for a moving target. Remember, the plan is to do two OGL backends : one for 1.5, including fixed function falllback and the same with OGL 2.0. This is a major endeavour, and nothing like getting a small demo up and running with GLSL...

Don't get me wrong : part of me is eager enough for OGL support in TSE that I could say I can't wait for it, but it's not true, e.g we can all wait for it. If you can't, 'cause you biz plan depends on it, well, whoever wrote it up maybe should do it again, or get fired :)
As has been said otherwise, there are games in the works using TSE, but at this point, you need some fairly competent programmers to bring over stuff from TGE, or implement your own game specifics functionality yourself.

#20 Actually, on the left-handed vs right-handed thing...

You can feed the same memory to OpenGL and D3D and it will work the same in both, they both use different systems, however it is all in how it reads the memory.