Audio Library

I know there is Open AL but an inclusion of an audio library along with the graphics one would be totally awesome!!!

well… there is my two-cents

-Aditya

OpenAL is really different than OpenGL. Only the names look the same.

OpenGL-like audio library will be included into OpenML. OpenML stands for Open Multimedia Library and is a kind of OpenGL extended to everything multimedia, including graphics (of course) and including audio (that you are talking about) as well as other stuff.

Take a look at the opengl.org homepage where OpenML news are regularily posted.

I’m totally with you on that one. Microsoft has wised up and put lots of stuff into their graphics API, such as input controls, sound, graphics, and various other cool little perks. If openGL wants to stay current they had better figure it out and go with the flow…

Microsoft has wised up and put lots of stuff into their graphics API, such as input controls, sound, graphics, and various other cool little perks.

Um, first of all DirectX started out with all of these “cool little perks”. In fact, putting these under one heading was one of the over design goals of the project.

The design goals of OpenGL do not include audio, input, etc. It is merely a graphics library. Note that virtually every Windows OpenGL game uses the rest of DirectX for sound, input, etc. OpenGL does not dictate OpenAL over DirectSound, just a Direct3D doesn’t dictate DirectSound over OpenAL. You can pick and choose as you see fit.

I think openGL should have a higher level libraries. Even glut is low level. They should really make much more high level libraries like DirectX will have and has already.

I tried to make a higher level graphics library for a game engine we were making.
Believe me, it is VERY application specific, not to mention platform specific.
It worked well, for our purpose, but that all.
Later on, I discarded it and rewrote the entire app-specific library in ASM!
OpenGL has the power over DirectX in its versality, flexibility and SPEED! So what, it takes extra time to obtain certain effects, but the pleasure is greater!
Not to mention that the game can be run on
slower machines too.

And, by the way, C and C++ are ASM wrapped in
cute keywords and language structures.

ASM what’s that?

Assembly.

well dont forget the fact that OPEN GL IS platform independant… well except if it is coded in VB… I was just saying that Open GL would be a lot more powerful if they had at least a simple set of functions that would allow us to play a music file or something of that sort…

-Aditya

Yeah right. It will even be much powerful if OpenGL has speech recognition, so the game developers can write platform independent speech recognition code using OpenGL.
It will be extremely powerful, if OpenGL supports spreadsheet features, such as loading Excel files, so that the users of OpenGL can view the spreadsheet in 3d.

Ever try SDL? Thats an open library that works across multiple platforms.

I dont see any reason why OpenGL needs to support sound. Sound and graphics are like milk and eggs… You need both to make a cake, but I doubt you’ll find them combined in a supermarket :stuck_out_tongue:

There are a huge number of “high-level” APIs available. Some, including Open Scene Graph (www.openscenegraph.org) are multi-platform.