OpenSceneGraph
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The OpenSceneGraph is an open source high performance 3D graphics toolkit, used by application developers in fields such as visual simulation, computer games, virtual reality, scientific visualization and modelling.
Written entirely in Standard C++ and OpenGL it runs on all Windows platforms, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, IRIX, Solaris and FreeBSD operating systems.
[edit] Features
- A full-featured and industry-proven scene graph
- High performance due to support for
- View frustum, small feature and occlusion culling
- Level of detail
- State sorting and lazy state updating
- OpenGL fast paths and latest extensions
- Multi-threading and database optimization
- Extensive support for OpenGL, from 1.1 through 2.0 including the latest extensions
- Tightly coupled support for OpenGL Shading Language, developed in conjunction with 3Dlabs
- Support for a wide range of 2D image and 3D database formats, with 34 loaders available including industry standards such as OpenFlight, TerraPage, OBJ, 3DS, JPEG, PNG and GeoTiff
- Particle effects
- High quality anti-aliased TrueType(R) text support
- Seamless support for framebuffer objects, pbuffers and frame buffer render-to-texture effects
- Multi-threaded database paging support, which can be used in conjunction with all 3D database and image loaders, allowing terabyte database to be explored at a solid 60Hz
- Large scale, whole earth geospatial terrain paged database generation
- Introspection support for core libraries allowing external applications to query, get, set and operate on all classes in the scene graph, via a generic interface
- Multi-threaded and highly configurable support for multiple CPU/multiple GPU machines
[edit] History
- Getting off the ground
- The project was started as a hobby by Don Burns in 1998, as means of porting a hang gliding simulator written on top of the Performer scene graph running on IRIX to what was then a humble Linux PC.
- Opening the way
- In 1999, Robert Osfield began helping out with the simulator development and ported the scene graph element to Windows.
- In September 1999 the source code was open sourced, and the openscenegraph.org website was born, with Robert taking over the scene graph project and Don focusing on the hang gliding simulator.
- Through the autumn and into winter Robert took the opportunity to embrace Standard C++ and Design Patterns, refactoring the scene graph to fit with new standards and methodoligies.
- Hobby becomes Obsession
- Obsesssion turns to Profession
- In April 2001, in response to growing interest in the project around the world, Robert went fulltime on the project, setting up OpenSceneGraph Professional Services providing commercial support, consultancy services and training.
- At the end of 2001 Don also formed his own company Andes Computer Engineering and participates in the development and support of OpenSceneGraph as well as complementary projects like OpenProducer and BlueMarbleViewer.
- Community Foundations
- The year of scalabilty
- Version 1.0
- OpenSceneGraph 1.0 release is the culmination of 6 years work by the lead developers and the open-source community that has grown up around the project. The real-time graphics industry and academia embraced it from the very beginning, deploying it in real world applications, and actively participating in its development, testing and refinement. The end result is a high quality library with a feature set relevant to application developers' needs.
- Version 1.1
- Lots of improvements in the code were added in this version. Feedback from the community regarding some bugs, especially in the build system, and requests for some new features that were very rapidly addressed made this a very short-lived release.
- Version 1.2
- This is the current stable version of OSG, includes all the new code from 1.1, and fixes from osg-userslist feedback.
