Tom
ZEQ2 Programmer
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 Friday, August 10, 2007
Well Zeq2 (or Zios in general) is currently using OGRE for 3d rendering. OGRE hides everything to do with graphical API's (DirectX and OpenGL), so we would never openly use OpenGL 3.0, but we may indirectly when/if it's implemented into OGRE.
There's also pyOpenGL though, but the samething, we'd have to wait until they implement OpenGL 3.0 into pyOpenGL. We're not currently using pyOpenGL though, so that's kind of moot.
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Alex
ZEQ2 Effects Programmer
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Sunday, August 19, 2007
Punio4 wrote : Huh?
I always thought there were the following 3d accel renders:
DirectX (most popular)
OpenGL (multi-platform)
Glide (long time gone)
Various software renders
You mean 3D Graphics API's, and you mean Direct3D, not DirectX, DirectX is a complete multi-media development API, encompassing far more than 3D Graphics, while OpenGL is only for graphics. D3D and OpenGl are the two main ones API's used today, though as OpenGL is an open standard, there are a few implementations (such as Mesa) which are implemented in software rather than hardware, so OpenGL itself is not a '3D Accelerator' in any form, just an interface for describing what will be rendered to the software or hardware which actually does the rendering.
When used with 3D Hardware, both OpenGl and D3D are simply ways of communicating to the GPU and instructing it on what to do. Direct3D is a popular choice because of DirectX being such a complete all round API and Windows is the main platform for non-console gaming, not to mention that the 360 runs on a version of DX, so it's a natural choice for a game aimed at both 360 and Windows. OpenGL, on the other hand, is a lot more extendable. Geometry Shaders and other "DX10" (I so dislike that term) level functionallity are unavailable in Direct3D 9 and DX10 is Vista only, meaning that you won't be able to take advantage of GF8 or ATI equivilent graphics cards on XP with it. OpenGL, on the other hand, had extensions released by NVidia fairly soon after the launch of the first GF8 series card, allowing all those features on OpenGL and XP without having to wait for OpenGL 3.0 to be finallised or having to upgrade to Vista for DX10.
While both OpenGL and D3D take care of rendering scenes, they are not rendering engines, rendering engines take care of organising what is to be rendered, assigning materials, shaders, culling unneeded and unseen geometry, optimizing the scenes, take care of positioning, orientation, transformations (the 3D term, not the DBZ term  ) and a heck of a lot more. Rendering engines use OpenGL or D3D, often with the choice of the two, at the back end and obscure with a abstraction layer inbetween for the developer to actually use, rather than having to worry about actual API calls as that can get quite messy if you want a modular, easilly changable game engine. Ogre3D, as Tom said, is the rendering engine zios is using, as it is completely independant of any reliance on a specific API and is cross-platform. pyOpenGl is python bindings to access the OpenGL API through a script or program written in python, though this is not a rendering engine and using it would require a new rendering engine to be written from scratch and that is not a simple job 
I'm personally very excited about OpenGL 3.0, I fell in love OpenGL's API as it was a lot easier to work with as beginner than Direct3D, quicker to learn and made more sense. With OpenGL 3.0 being object orientated, it looks even simpler and cleaner than before, no longer has all the fat from legacy standards which are no longer in use and, just generally, sounds superb.
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Punio4
Somewhat Nifty
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Monday, August 20, 2007
Thank you for the reply, and it was a typo, I meant Direct3D, not DX.
Anyway, does that mean that Zios is using an already available rendering engine? I thought you guys made your own, considering that it's acually textureless, and thus, innovative.
By rendering engine, you mean, like Quake3, which is the same for Quake3, Enemy Territory, Jedi Academy, Call of Duty, etc?
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Alex
ZEQ2 Effects Programmer
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Monday, August 20, 2007
No, the Quake 3 engine is a complete Game Engine, it's everything needed to make a game with, the rendering is just a part of the engine. Ogre3D is just a rendering engine, no audio, no networking, no gameplay features, no AI, no input, nothing like that, just the graphics. Zios is a modular game engine, which uses multiple open source libraries, such as Ogre3D for rendering or ODE for physics and so forth, with the intention that the game developers using Zios game swap and change the different modules to their suiting. For example, if they wanted to use their own rendering engine, they make like a plugin for it and slot it in instead of Ogre; or if they want to use Novadex or Bullet instead of ODE and so forth.
Zios is what changes it from just being a collection of libraries to being a fully fledged, easy to use game engine. I think Brad's intention for it is to allow even those with little knowledge of game development at all to be able to make quality games quickly and easily.
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Flutie Flakes
