Leveraging renderer-specific capabilities (like 3D)
Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2006 03:07
What are the major obstacles to overcome to allow widgets to be drawn using specific functionality available only on certain renderers?
For instance, a rotation ball widget like GLUI's would be neat to have. (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui/)
It there some obvious way to make the problem tractable? Right now it seems everything renderer and every widget has to conform to a lowest-common denominator of supporting/requiring only texturing and alphablending. But many of the supported renderers can do much much more than that. It would be great to be able to take advantage of the 3D capabilities of the most popular renderers somehow.
(And mostly I don't want to have to give up on my arc-ball widget! It's too handy. )
For instance, a rotation ball widget like GLUI's would be neat to have. (http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/glui/)
It there some obvious way to make the problem tractable? Right now it seems everything renderer and every widget has to conform to a lowest-common denominator of supporting/requiring only texturing and alphablending. But many of the supported renderers can do much much more than that. It would be great to be able to take advantage of the 3D capabilities of the most popular renderers somehow.
(And mostly I don't want to have to give up on my arc-ball widget! It's too handy. )