Fuzz of the week is a weekly column where I give a shout out to a company or product that deserves some recognition. My pick for this week is OpenGL. For those of you that don’t know OpenGL is an application programming interface (API) for graphics applications. OpenGL got an early start back in 1992 on scanline rendering techniques using hardware acceleration (your video card). One of the largest releases of a game supporting openGL was the original Half Life. Since then OpenGL has not enjoyed the popularity and success of DirectX in the gaming market, although OpenGL has managed to stay very relevant in the professional graphics sector. There is no other hardware graphics API as complete that has such widespread support and is so openly documented. Everything from Mac OSX to Linux to the Playstation 3 uses OpenGL.

I originally went to school for a digital film/animation degree before I switched my major to computer science, so I have a lot of time behind the wheel of various 3D software suites (StudioMax, Maya, SoftImage, Lightwave). I’ve continued this hobby of mine on today, and I’ve become quite skilled at producing architectural

renderings, and using a little rendering engine called Vray; unfortunately I was never exposed to Blender while in school. Blender is an open-source (free) 3d graphics suite that can do some amazing stuff, and it has close integration with OpenGL. Every year at the Blender Conference the features of the application are put up for display. Blender is an important contributor to the OpenGL and graphics scene in general because they are helping to push the envelope of realtime and rendered graphics, and we are beginning to see the effects of this, you’ll see a little further down the article why this is good. Read and explore more about Blender with the links below.

Blender Forum 2007 Videos

download Blender

Blender home

Where’s my Matrix?

It wasn’t long ago when I heard over and over again that computers would soon reach the point where simulating real-to-life scenes and images in games would be a reality. Well that hasn’t happened yet, and we aren’t all plugged into machines interacting in a virtual world *yet* … Not that I like being fed intravenously, it’s just I wouldn’t mind a little nicer graphics in (place hyped game title here). What most people don’t realize is all of the technology from rendering engines, and lighting algorithms eventually makes its way into the graphics API’s (DirectX, and OpenGL) that our games are designed with. So we should be thanking some college kid’s at MIT for the awesome light haze effects in Gears of War 2. I’m not saying the game companies themselves don’t write their own shaders and do a lot of work, but in all honesty we wouldn’t be where we are without the original proof of concept.

So where does OpenGL fit into all of this, and why did I go on a long tangent about pretty looking games? If we want our games to look better, we need to cross the gap between rendered mediums and real-time API-driven mediums. I truly believe we are seeing this happen, with the release of OpenGL 3.0, there is now a software that is likely more capable and more relevant than even DirectX 10 in terms of capability. The best part is, using an open product like OpenGL that runs on lots of different platforms is the most ideal way to see an open source revolution in game development and code. I really can’t wait until the day that not only does Blender use OpenGL to it’s fullest potential, but open-source RTS, FPS, and RPG game-engine projects provide the recourses to make great looking games to the average Joe, or a small group of developers.

For those of us that don’t play games, OpenGL will most likely continue to be used in video, audio, and imaging applications for rendering acceleration. Hopefully we will see our favorite applications more easily moved to other operating systems, in addition to more advanced open source applications in this realm.

Are we really going to see games soon that use OpenGL? I’m not sure what the answer to that is, but I know there are several projects to make games on the Linux platform. Imagine a social network phenomenon in game development, driven by open source! Hopefully the maturing and release of OpenGL 3.0 will encourage developers (maybe someday including myself) to regain interest in programming for graphics. It’s a time consuming and laborious involvement, but hopefully someday this will be abstracted to a point to where knowledge of a language similar to JavaScript, Perl, or Python might lend itself to coding for an open-source engine! I am eager to see what the next several years hold for pc gaming, and open source in general – OpenGL’s not dead, and PC Games certainly aren’t either.