Actually, there was a question similar to this in the survey section of this website.
Honestly, the result of your survey here(5 or six responses so far) can at most indicate how many bored people in this so-called advanced developer forum on OpenGL working on different types of applications.
Lordkronos, I felt the overall jist of the question, was what ppl actually do, not strictly what do ppl use opengl for. I do kind of use it for my games coding career, but strictly speaking I dont make games using it.
But I’m not actually writing a game. I’m writing a library that can load models and draw them with OpenGL. It’s called Spider3d…shameless pimping: http://www.spider3d.com
I’m currently writing a plugin for LightWave3D that will export Spider3D model files. I figured why write a bunch of importing code for other model file formats when I can just write a Spider3D *.s3d exporter for a modeling package.
[This message has been edited by WhatEver (edited 04-05-2002).]
The reason to import other formats is that there’s 1,000x more people who want to use a custom mesh they found on the web, than there are people who can actually make decent custom meshes.
jwatte:
Yes, but you can always import the model you download into 3dsmax/lightwave and then use the spider3d exporter, or whatever. Plus, you have the advantage of being able to extract exactly the data you want, including special world attributes etc. from the model in your cad package.
You can also do stuff like get max to create collision geometry for you automatically in an exporter - well, I’ve done something like this with splines being converted to cylinders.
A lot of these things can be done in your ‘engine’ once it’s imported them, but it’s another preprocessing step which could be avoided.