Game Development Community

3D API's

by William Finlayson · in Technical Issues · 03/16/2002 (4:56 pm) · 5 replies

Could anyone tell me what the most commonly used/most widely supported 3D API's are on the Mac and Linux platforms, that offer hardware support?

I know that Mesa and OpenGL are available for Linux, but I really don't have a clue when it comes to Mac's. I had a look at Glide, because that was supposed to work with Mac's, but I couldn't find the Dev kit, and anyway, Glide seems to be pretty obsolete now.

Thanks for any help you can give.
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Torque Owner Yacine Salmi
#1
03/16/2002 (5:22 pm)
You are right. Glide is pretty much dead now.

You're safest bet (maybe, your only choice) is OpenGL/Mesa.

Torque Owner Mychal McCabe
#2
03/16/2002 (7:16 pm)
Open GL is alive and well on the Mac, really the way to go here.

OS X's support for it is first rate. Graeme Devine is on record as saying that he and J.Carmack believe OS X's implementation of OpenGL is the best out there.

What are you looking to do though?

William Finlayson
#3
03/17/2002 (3:38 pm)
Cool, thanks for that. I'm trying to get some cross-platform 3D acceleration under java, without resorting to Java3D (too huge). I only want basic support (rendering triangles), so full OpenGL bindings for java seem like over-kill. The smaller the required libraries, the better.

Just a persolnal project, nice to get some practice in with JNI.

Torque Owner Trevor Barnett
#4
03/17/2002 (3:53 pm)
You're forgetting SDL (www.libsdl.org). Multi-platform and it works.

Torque Owner Yacine Salmi
#5
03/17/2002 (7:41 pm)
Yes, SDL is excellent, but I don't think that's what he was asking for. SDL isn't a 3D API. OpenGL can be used alongside SDL for 3D support, but you could also just use OpenGL.