At the time this idea generated some intrest and I was (and still am) fully intending to make it at some point however at the time it was put on hold because OpenGL 3.0 was starting to make the rounds and things were promised 'soon'.
So, I put off any major work for the update.
Time passed and everyone was looking forward to news at SIGGRAPH07 about the improve API, and news appeared and things looked good, they still had some issues to sort out but everything was ok and they would let us know 'soon'.
Just over two months after SIGGRAPH07 a post is made on the OpenGL.org message board saying they had found some issues which weren't earth shattering but they wanted to sort out. They had also improved things and set a min. specification for what to expect hardware wise.
This announcement was greated warmly with replies of 'keep up the good work' and 'we'd rather you get it right than rush it' as it was a major redesign.
This was November 30th 2007 and pretty much the last offical explaination of whats going on. There was something posted vaguely hinting at 'soon' before Xmas 07 but nothing since. We've had effective 6 months of silence now and everyone has pretty much started to get sick of it.
Lets not forget that at SIGGRAPH07 it was all praise and glory, that the joining with Khronos was a good thing (and it looked like it, having got the OpenGL|ES specs out quickly and to a good reception) and there would be more Pipeline news letters and more communication in general.
8 months on and we've mostly had a wall of silence.
From the start, and during this journal, I have been very vocal about how much I was looking forward to OpenGL3 and the new interface, I also counciled patience with them as they got the spec right so that we all count benifit; to be honest now I just feel let down and generally fed up of the whole thing. Waiting, fine I can deal with that, but without updates it's like waiting for nothing and well, I've had enough.
So, this weekend, depending on how I feel post-working week wise, I intend to begin the process of learning about the DX10 API. I'm on Vista and have a DX10 card as such I see no reason to do other wise.
When I first started learning 3D graphics OpenGL had 2 things going for it;
1) the API was better than D3D8 which was around at the time
2) I was young and nieve and thought being crossplatform mattered.
Well, these days D3D9 is probably better in some regards than OpenGL and I believe D3D10 is an improvement on that and I don't care all that much about 2 as it's not like I run Linux or OSX anyway at home; if I ever need it I can always write the required backend later.
I'm not saying I'm never going to use OpenGL3.0 again, and if GL3.0 ever appears and the API is sane I might jump back but for now I want to work on something and I'm sick of waiting and ATI's lack of D3D10 feature extension support just makes developing cross vendor, never mind cross platform, games a problem right now.
So, on to the new frontier and I'll be seeing you in a DirectX forum sooner than you might think [smile]
