OpenTK - Home of the Open Toolkit library

The Open Toolkit library 0.9.9-3

the Fiddler — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:54:15 -0500

OpenTK 0.9.9-3 is the fourth work-in-progress snapshot of the 0.9.9 series that will lead to our first stable release.

0.9.9-3 resolves a large number of issues in the OpenGL and OpenCL bindings, the NativeWindow and the GLControl classes, as well as the math library.

Users of previous OpenTK versions are encouraged to upgrade. Please read the release notes for upgrade instructions.

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 rc1

the Fiddler — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 11:26:26 -0500

With the almost 4-year long development cycle drawing to an end, OpenTK 1.0 rc-1 is released. This is a release candidate, which means the code is considered production-ready.

Notable changes:

NSIS-based installer for Windows. OpenTK is automatically added to the "Add References" dialog - no need to hunt for the dlls manually anymore.
New targets for Build.exe: lib (build library), nsis (build installer), all (build everything!) Runtime for a complete build: 26 minutes 7 seconds on a 1.8GHz Core 2 and a 80GB X25-M Intel SSD.
Various improvements to behavior on Windows and (especially) Linux. Multithreaded rendering now works as expected.
Minor documentation fixes.

Depending on user feedback, a new release candidate may or may not be published in the following days.

Work will now focus on documentation and packaging. If you are interested in helping out, here are some things that would really help:

Test and provide feedback on the new windows installer.
#1404: [OpenTK] Create project templates for Visual Studio and MonoDevelop (help wanted)
#1406: [OpenTK] Create DEB packages for Debian/Ubuntu and derivatives (help wanted)
#1407: [OpenTK] Create RPM packages for Fedora/openSUSE and derivatives (help wanted)

OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 released

the Fiddler — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:25:59 -0600

Khronos has just announced the release of the OpenGL 3.3 and OpenGL 4.0 specifications. New features include:

Improved interoperability with OpenCL
Tessellation shaders
More flexible fragment shaders
Shader subroutines
64bit precision data types
sampler objects (finally!)

OpenGL 4.0 presumably requires DX11-level hardware, while OpenGL 3.3 will remain compatible with DX10-level GPUs.

OpenGL 3.3 and 4.0 support will land in OpenTK 1.1.

Official announcement: opengl.org.

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 beta-3

the Fiddler — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:28:29 -0600

The third beta release for OpenTK 1.0 is now available for download.

Feature highlights:

Improves GameWindow stability on all platforms.
Improves support for multithreaded rendering and adds a new multithreading sample.
Fixes a number of issues affecting mouse and keyboard input.
Fixes a number of minor issues affecting the OpenGL bindings.
Adds hardcopy (PDF) versions of the manual and function reference.

Users previous release are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

OpenTK 1.0 beta-3 is considered feature complete. Help us make a great final release by reporting all issues you encounter!

Function reference now available online

the Fiddler — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 04:55:50 -0600

The new function reference for OpenTK is now available online. It includes documentation and class diagrams for all public OpenTK 1.0 members, as well as the various native APIs (OpenGL, OpenGL ES, OpenAL). The reference will also be available offline in PDF format.

Many thanks to the doxygen team for creating such a useful tool!

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 beta-2

the Fiddler — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:30:08 -0600

The second beta release for OpenTK 1.0 is now available for download.

Feature highlights:

Improves support for Mac OS X.
Adds support for *BSD and Solaris systems (experimental).
Resolves all issues identified in beta-1.
Resolves all known issues in the OpenGL 3.1 and 3.2 bindings.
Completely disables CL10, ES10 and ES11 to reduce download size. These features will be reintroduced in trunk builds.

Users of beta-1 and previous versions are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

OpenTK 1.0 beta-2 is considered feature complete. Help us make a great 1.0 final release by reporting all issues you encounter!

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 beta-1

the Fiddler — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:29:20 -0600

Containing a significant amount of bug- and stability fixes, OpenTK 1.0 beta-1 is released to the world. Download from Sourceforge.

Feature highlights:

A large number of new examples.
Various stability fixes on all operating systems.
Improved support for multithreading.
Type-safe OpenGL|ES 2.0 bindings.

Due to the number and significance of the included bug fixes, users are strongly encouraged to upgrade from earlier versions.

Warning: a number of features did not make the cut for 1.0 beta-1 and will not appear in the final 1.0 release. These features include the OpenTK.Compute.CL10 and OpenTK.Graphics.ES10/ES11 namespaces. If your code requires support for these features, please recompile OpenTK with the EXPERIMENTAL compiler flag or download the latest 1.x-dev release.

OpenGL 3.2 API quick reference card

the Fiddler — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:47:41 -0500

A must read for all OpenGL developers: OpenGL 3.2 quick reference card! Also available for OpenCL.

Kudos to Khronos for creating those PDFs. They are invaluable for looking up some specific parameter or function quickly.

Now, I'm going to print them out and keep them by my workstation.

The Open Toolkit library 0.9.8-3 and 0.9.9-2

the Fiddler — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 05:18:04 -0500

Download OpenTK 0.9.8-3
Download OpenTK 0.9.9-2b

OpenTK 0.9.8-3 is the final bugfix release in the 0.9.8 series. Read the complete 0.9.8-3 release notes.

OpenTK 0.9.9-2 is the third work-in-progress snapshot of the 0.9.9 series that will lead to our first stable release. 0.9.9-2 contains significant changes to the project structure. Please read the [API changes] section on the 0.9.9-2 release notes.

Important: the 0.9.9-2 release has been superseded by 0.9.9-2b, due to an issue with missing AllowPartialTrustedCallers attributes. If you have downloaded 0.9.9-2, please re-download 0.9.9-2b. Thank you for your understanding.

C# OpenCL bindings ready for testing

the Fiddler — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:22:27 -0500

Update: current efforts are focused on Cloo (object-oriented CL wrapper), which can be found here. It provides a much cleaner OpenCL API compared to raw bindings (which are also available in case you need them).

The generator now supports generating C# OpenCL wrappers from the C headers. The OpenCL wrappers reside under the OpenTK.Compute.CL10 namespace of SVN trunk. An OpenCL sample has also been added to Examples.exe: if you have access to an OpenCL implementation, please run the VectorAdd sample and report your results here.

AMD has released a public beta of its OpenCL implementation that you can download from AMD's developer website (free registration needed). This implementation runs on all SSE3-capable CPUs and is available for Window and Linux platforms.

There is a lot of fine-tuning left to do for OpenTK's OpenCL wrappers and the sooner you test the bindings, the sooner they will become ready for release.