[fpc-pascal] fpGUI powered by OpenGL

[Darius Blaszyk]

On Mon, 2010-12-20 at 16:47 +0100, Reimar Grabowski wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 15:50:52 +0100
> <dhkblaszyk at zeelandnet.nl> wrote:
> 
> > > But why is it not possible to integrate this with the regular fpGUI ?
> > > Can you explain in a couple of sentences ?
> > 
> >  Thats not all however, there are minusses. By using glut, you limit 
> >  yourself to the supported platforms/targets. So if new platforms/targets 
> >  come along then there is no way (unless you supply patches to the 
> >  project) to add them. With the current approach you're free to do it 
> >  yourself. Also the API is plain rigid. This means you'll have to adapt 
> >  to that and live with it (notice it's a plus and minus depending on how 
> >  you look at it). (That is why I would like to see a fpGlut some day ;) 
> >  and believe me it will come to that eventually!)

> First of all good work, but I hope to never see any abominations like
>  fpGlut around. Glut is just a major PITA and should not be used by
>  anybody for anything serious. It was developed to make it easy to
I wouldn't use the same words as you do, but I agree it's sub-optimal ;)

>  write SIMPLE OpenGL DEMOS in a cross plattform way. Since then it has
>  been used for all kinds of stuff although it has some big limitations
>  namely its mainloop and the callback shenanigans. Both interfere with
>  the nature of a GUI framework and therefor I don't really understand
>  why you based your work on glut. OpenGL is a graphics lib and glut
>  includes window creation, mouse and key handling, etc which should be
>  separate. You don't need glut to use OpenGL you just need a valid
>  context. I don't know anything about the inner workings of fpGUI but
>  if you think that a fpGlut would help you then I am sure a
>  fpOpenGLContext would help even more and perhaps make it possible to
>  merge the code back to regular fpGUI. Benefits of custom context
>  generation are that you have more control over its options
>  (ColorBuffer-, DepthBuffer-, OtherKindOfBuffers-Resolution, double-,
>  triple-, quadbuffering, etc.), no mainloop or callbacks (the
>  TOpenGLContext of the LCL works with the standard LCL event system and
>  application mainloop) and no need for glut support on the target
>  platform (every OpenGL capable platform exposes a way to create a
I should have chosen my words more carefully. With fpGlut I actually did
not mean to port freeglut to pascal, but actually create a platform
independent context handling library (as you describe). 

>  context). The drawback is that context generation is a little more
>  complex than using glut and that it is platform dependend. I haven't
This is the reason why I started using GLut. Just as proof of concept.

>  looked into the new OpenGL stuff > 3.0 but I know there was talk about
>  simplifying context generation and to try to make it more similar on
>  the different platforms. So IMHO getting rid of glut and integrating
>  an OpenGL context into fpGUI should make it possible to just use
>  OpenGL as a standard backend for fpGUI. I am not really interested in
Totally agree

>  doing this myself but if you need help I will do what I can.
If I get enough help I could be interested in starting a new project.

Darius