[cl-opengl-devel] Re: freeglut.dll + scope of cl-opengl

[Luís Oliveira]

"Lester Vecsey" <lvecsey at nyc.rr.com> writes:
> On windows the freeglut source is currently only meant to be built with
> MSVC, as opposed to mingw/msys, and it may be some time until thats
> resolved. So it might be a good idea to make a copy of the above mentioned
> freeglut.dll available at the common-lisp.net/project/cl-opengl page.

I don't have convenient access to Windows. When I have the chance I will
compile freeglut and upload it to c-l.net. cl-opengl is still in its
infancy, anyway.


> A couple other minor notes with the redbook examples so far. With CLISP, the
> character #\Esc is mentioned in rb3-lines.lisp and rb4-poly.lisp, and above,
> and had to be changed to #\Escape

#\Esc works for me in CLISP. What version are you using?


> As I understand it cl-opengl is currently dependent on freeglut to open a GL
> canvas.

Not really. You can use whatever toolkit you prefer.


> Is there any interest in having a few C functions to call in to, or
> perhaps written entirely in Lisp as CFFI to each of the required underlying
> functions, to generate the Windows HWND and XWindows surfaces? On windows,
> the WndProc functions which takes care of mouse and keyboard events would be
> handled with a separate package, and similarly for XWindows with its
> Xevents. The benefit here is that for many applications you may not need the
> extensive menu system of freeglut and thus can eliminate the dependency on
> that library.

See above. Rolling our own GLUT-like thing in Lisp might have various
advantages. Namely, we wouldn't have to worry about the C library
rudely calling exit(), sigh.

Anyone is free to start such a project, I'd certainly use that!

CL-GLUT is just a convenient way of *playing* with cl-opengl and OpenGL
in general. That was my goal while writing those bindings anyway.


[...]
> The programmer would use these wrappers only around code that would benefit
> from having these display lists built to persist over more than a few
> frames.

One of cl-opengl's goal is to be Lispy so it only makes sense that
a convenient way to use display lists will be designed even if not as
fancy as what you suggest.

Sounds interesting though. I've never seen the cells opengl stuff but
surely cells-opengl can be implemented using the cl-opengl bindings.

-- 
Luís Oliveira
luismbo (@) gmail (.) com
Equipa Portuguesa do Translation Project
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/translation/registry.cgi?team=pt