ATI hate me, I think.

[BLURB:] A choice made 5 years ago is not effecting my 3D ENGINE!!! Grrrrr.... Have to put VBO development on hold! Grrrrr.... Vertex Array Object works like a charm... YAY!

[DEVELOPMENT: Archetype Engine]

Ok, I busted my mental hump trying to figure out VBOs. For PyOpenGL, most documentation on the subject is almost three years old and given as a code snippet at this website. The problem is, when I tried using that code, glGenBuffers would fail. It's either claim I was passing 2 arguments when it only wanted 1, or that the function didn't exist at all! Grrrrrr!!!!! After well over five hours of painful googling (all hail the Google) AND upgrading my copy of pyopengl from 3.0.0 to 3.0.1 I have generally narrowed the issue down to my ATI drivers... or, at least I believe that to be the case.

See... I'm running on Linux; Ubuntu 10.04 to be exact, and, in general, ATI doesn't think very much about us Linux people. Arguments for the ATI mentality aside, the result is, the ATI drivers for Linux are not as good or as up to date as those on Windows. As such, I wouldn't be surprised if the implementation for VBOs wasn't completed in the Linux ATI driver and that is what's giving me my issue. I could be wrong, but I can't think of an alternate reason at the moment.

So what does that mean over all? Does that mean I cannot code VBOs into my engine? HELL NO it doesn't mean that! It just means I have more research to do. I'll have to look into the extensions method for vertex buffer objects and do something like:


if not bool(glGenBuffers):
glGenBuffersARB(1, buff)


Not to mention having to deal with the case of whether or not the extension exists or not. There's ways around it, I suspect, but to get VBOs up and running, I have a lot more reading to do.


[RANDOM THOUGHTS:]

Open Hardware! We have open source software and open hardware exists to a degree (gumstixfor instance). I would LOVE to see an open hardware graphics card! I know, I know... that's a hugely tall order, but think of the total win factor such a device (and the company that produces it) would have if it were done! A hardware device that could be plugged into any computer (mac/windows/linux/other) and have drivers available. If drivers aren't immediately available, the specs are open for driver developers to plunge right in and code some up! No more half-assed features from one OS to another.

Yes... before anyone decides to flame me for what I'm saying, I'm well aware that this is more a dream than anything that could be set into motion. I'd love to take a crack at it, but I am so completely not a hardware guy. Not even to mention ATI and NVidia are so far ahead of the game in terms of graphic processing hardware that any small time company looking to start would be entering with hardware, more than likely, a couple generations behind (or more) and would more than likely collapse due to the imbalance of those who would buy the hardware to support it and the ideals, and those that wouldn't because it wouldn't be able to run the top tier games.

I CAN DREAM, THOUGH, DAMMIT!

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*cough*
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Thank you for playing, please come again