OpenTK news

The Open Toolkit library 0.9.9-3

the Fiddler — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:54:15 -0700

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.

(blog) Thoughts on OpenTK documentation

the Fiddler — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 09:34:45 -0800

This question makes me think. Do you consider OpenTK well-documented? What parts do you consider lacking? What would you like to see?

I don't really know where OpenTK is standing in the documentation issue. According to Ohloh, 30% of all source code lines are comments, which is higher than average (22%). Considering OpenTK contains around 850000 lines of code, this number is nothing to laugh at. (Yeah, the numbers are probably overblown, no I have no idea how they are calculated :-).)

OpenTK is built on the premise that you are using an IDE with code-completion and documentation tooltips. Used on its own, it is actually more complex than straight OpenGL or OpenAL. This additional complexity is spent on type-safety and function overloads that smooth the differences between .Net and native code, which is a major win when using a .Net IDE like Visual Studio, MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop.

Site theme upgrade - community4

the Fiddler — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 08:57:12 -0800

Please refresh your browsers! (F5)

The new theme has slightly cleaner colors and a tweaked layout that should be easier on the eyes. It also implements a CSS-based frontpage that should be slightly faster to load.

This is the forth revision of the original community theme and has been tested on IE8, Firefox 4, Chrome 7, Opera 10.6 and Safari 5. It should degrade gracefully on older browsers, excepting possibly IE6 which is completely unsupported.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems or have any suggestions for improvement!

Moving to Bazaar/Launchpad (part 1 - planning)

the Fiddler — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:21:26 -0800

Ok, I'm officially fed up with SVN. For the past 4 years, I've lost countless hours to its peculiarities and general slowness. It's time for a change.

Enter Bazaar:

it is fast and powerful
it is extremely intuitive
it is cross-platform
it integrates well with Launchpad (more on that later)

In short, it has the right balance of features, speed and usability for a project like OpenTK.

I have to add that I was very tempted to go with Git, but ultimately decided against it. Git is a great tool but it has two deal-breaking deficiencies:

it is significantly less intuitive than Bazaar and has a pretty steep learning curve (the manual for "git log" is 24 pages long)
git-svn takes more than an hour to pull OpenTK from Sourceforge.

On the upside, Git is blazing fast and has a huge community behind it. While this doesn't outweigh the disadvantages for OpenTK, it is the weapon of choice for many open-source developers - git-bzr should take care of that.

New OpenTK 1.0 release: 6 October 2010

the Fiddler — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:03:13 -0700

It's been a while, so grab it while it's hot!

This release fixes various issues reported over the past few months, improves documentation, example code and the installer, and features a brand new build system. (Detailed release notes)

The new system is based on MSBuild and is more maintainable, faster and fully automated: version numbers, installers and and releases can all be generated with a single click. It has been tested on Visual Studio 2010, MonoDevelop 2.4, msbuild 4.0 and xbuild 2.6.7. Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 will no longer be able to build OpenTK.

This is not as bad as it sounds. OpenTK still targets .Net 2.0 and can be used in VS2005 and VS2008 just fine (you just won't be able to build OpenTK itself through those IDEs). This move was necessary for the upcoming .Net 4.0 builds.

The next release will focus on proper OpenGL 3.3/4.1 support and should be ready in about two weeks. A buildbot will supply nightly builds in the meantime (details to be announced shortly).

Till next time!

The Open Toolkit library 1.0 rc1

the Fiddler — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:26:26 -0700

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 06:25:59 -0800

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 06:28:29 -0800

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 02:55:50 -0800

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 07:30:08 -0800

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 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:29:20 -0800

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 13:47:41 -0700

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 03:18:04 -0700

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 13:22:27 -0700

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.

The Open Toolkit library 0.9.8-2 and 0.9.9-1

the Fiddler — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:21:23 -0700

Download OpenTK 0.9.8-2
Download OpenTK 0.9.9-1

OpenTK 0.9.8-2 is a bugfix release in the 0.9.8 series. Features:

TextPrinter.Print() no longer ignores the specified color.
Various GL methods with string[] parameters are now correctly wrapped.

Read the complete 0.9.8-2 release notes.

OpenTK 0.9.9-1 is a work-in-progress snapshot of what will become our first stable release. This release is strictly for testing and feedback purposes: if you are a new user, you are strongly advised to stay with the 0.9.8 series until the new code stabilizes.

Features:

Initial OpenGL 3.2 support.
Initial support for OpenGL ES 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0.
Bugfixes for OpenCL, OpenAL and OpenGL.
Various changes and bugfixes to the math library and the GameWindow.

Major changes are in progress, so please expect bugs and missing features. In particular, Mac OS X support may be broken and the new GameWindow and OpenTK.Input APIs are incomplete.

Read the complete 0.9.9-1 release notes.