I went to www.openscenegraph.org, I downloaded the demos, and I liked what I saw. Now I want to get started using it, but I can’t find a single tutorial, users’ manual, or anything. I realize it is in the beta stage, but why even release the source if there is no documentation? Does anyone know what’s up with this project? Is it dead or is it alive and kicking? Any input would be appreciated.
I guess the lack of replies means no one’s using OSG.
There are definately people using OSG, the project is far from dead. The mailing list is very active and has a lot of helpful subscribers.
You should take a look at the slides Robert made for a lecture he held when visiting us a while back:
http://www.openscenegraph.org/download/bazaar/VRLabLecture/index.html
There will be books in the future, but for now you’ll have to read all the many examples in the distribution, read the doxygen and source.
Good luck!
Thanks for the reply, Mortis (Rigor?). I had browsed those pages before, but I didn’t find them as detailed as I would have liked. I guess I’m looking for a “getting started” type of document like the one available for OpenSG (www.opensg.org). As for the examples, they mainly just load an entire scene with a single call to osgDB::readNodeFiles and then do something with it like add a second texture map to all the objects. And I can’t find any docs for the .osg file format. I want to be able to take a set of vertex/primative data and buid a scene graph by hand that will draw it. I’ll keep trying.
Originally posted by Aaron:
I went to www.openscenegraph.org, I downloaded the demos, and I liked what I saw. Now I want to get started using it, but I can’t find a single tutorial, users’ manual, or anything. I realize it is in the beta stage, but why even release the source if there is no documentation?
Documentation is one of the projects weak points right now, but more docs and demos codes are being added each week.
There documention available right now can be found in the doc/ directory in the distribution, this contains html files on various topics, and the autogeneratd docs.
There are well over twenty demos to have a look at. Yep this are often just load a database and do something with it, which is actually how 90% of users of will use a scene graph. There are also demos which show how to creates primitives from scatch such as osggeometry.
Also browse the various codes available on the bizaar.
The source code of the project itself will reveal alot too, just dive in.
If you are used to programming with scene graphs like Performer you should feel pretty at home too, as the general concepts are similar.
Originally posted by Aaron:
Does anyone know what’s up with this project? Is it dead or is it alive and kicking? Any input would be appreciated.
The OpenSceneGraph is far from dead.
Last week I totalled up the mailing list activity stats to answer another question on scene graphs elsewhere on opengl.org.
The result was that of the 2702 messages posted over the Sep-November on the Plib, SGL, OpenSG, OpenRM and OpenSceneGraph public mailing lists all hosted at sourceforge.
OpenSceneGraph was the most active with 1590 or 59% were posted on the OpenSceneGraph mailing list. More activity than all the rest of the open source scene graphs put together.
Plib came second with 655 messages, or 24%, OpenSG came third with 367, or 14%.
So… if you want your questions answer join the mailing list, there are plenty of questions being answered all the time. Search the achives too.
Regards,
Robert.