Reputation: 2517
High level, OpenGL friendly libraries for a beginner-intermediate C++ programmer
It's recently been suggested to me that I should "skip low level apis entirely for now and just use some high level libraries built on top of them. Because building on plain opengl/directx is a lot of work, even for an experienced programmer"
Can anyone suggest some or a place where i can find some that will suite me? Thanks!
Upvotes: 7
Views: 4657
Answers (2)
Reputation: 701
IMO, in terms of abstracting from the platform that you're working with (ie, getting a context, getting keyboard/mouse input, etc) GLFW beats all.
But people are often looking for more than a way to open a window. More often than not, what they're looking for is an implementation of what's called a scene graph. A good one will abstract just about everything one can do in GL into an intuitive tree structure (technically a graph, but it's often easier to consider it a tree). And nearly all the libraries in this category provide context-opening, model-loading, and debugging capabilities of their own, for completeness.
Some of the popular libraries in this category are OpenSceneGraph and Ogre3D. Horde3D looks promising as well but it hasn't had an 'official' release yet.
Upvotes: 3
Reputation: 52410
It really depends on what you're trying to do. Many people opt for something like SDL (simple directmedia layer) that is an abstraction over OpenGL/DirectDraw/GDI (and more) but it's still kind of low-level. It works natively with c++.
Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."
One advantage of choosing a very popular library like this one is that there's a TON of example work out there.
Upvotes: 4