OpenGL++: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:58, 23 December 2006

Revision as of 00:30, 13 January 2007

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==At the end==

In the end, there is little to show for any of these efforts. Partnerships with Sun, Intel and IBM and Microsoft all led to nothing as SGI jumped from project to project. In retrospect, SGI reacted badly to a rapidly changing environment. An internal desire to create ana generic but extensible scene graph was constantly sidetracked by a belief that SGI couldn't go it alone. Partnerships were formed and later abandoned due to irreconcilable differences or simply as priorities and internal pressures shifted. OGL++ was the most nacent of these efforts and its failure forced an unholy alliance between Microsoft and SGI in the form of Fahrenheit. Ancillary issues like powerful CAD APIs running on Cosmo3D complicated the picture. In the final analysis the new unified scene graph concept was bounced from project to project, and eventually died in 2000 when Fahrenheit was killed.

Today, no such standardized scene graph exists, and SGI has all but exited the API world. SGI has released the earlier Open Inventor code into [[open source]], but the source to OGL++ was never completed to any satisfactory degree. No specification exists and as with OpenGL the spec and idea behind such an open platform would have been what lent it it's lasting value, not a single implementation of a scene graph idea.