Hi guys,
I've recently begun a new project and am trying to become openGL 3.1 compliant (looks like everyone is trying to quickly skip past the half hearted 3.0 release).
I've noticed that the release candidate 2.6.0 is now up for download. Skimming the change log I see that it is in an effort to implement openGL 3.x support.
What I'd like to confirm is:
1. To what degree is openGL 3.x support now implemented in this release?
2. Do I require any custom procedure calls to activate an openGL 3.x context? If so what are they?
On a small note I noticed that in an effort to remove fixed pipeline functionality in the demos custom matrices are now being created and added using glLoadMatrixf(). My apologies if I'm wrong or behind in the current state of changes but I believe this function is also depreciated and removed in openGL 3.1.
As a quick contribution regarding people's opinion's of the role of freeGLUT. I personally believe that whatever it HAS been, it needs to become a robust end-user API that can run on current openGL versions without compromising performance. People have been using it for its incredible simplicity for many many years now, it is proven to be stable and a good performer.
In the future full openGL 3.x support will be required for users to continue using GLUT and still benefit from performance improvements to the API. The other natural choice of course is something like SDL, who are likely to add this support in the 1.3/2.0 release; however I believe they are looking at comercialising SDL, which would leave freeGLUT as the only good, free multiplatform API for openGL. I would not like to see this happen, I doubt any openGL fans would be happy about this. Maybe it is worth asking companies with investments in openGL to help contribute to freeGLUT for these reasons.
