OpenGL and Windows2000 (and beyond)

there has been an issue on whether OpenGL will be supported/included with future versions of Windows (win2000 and after).

anyone has any info on that?

Thanks

I use Win2000 for my development platform and OpenGL is available; hardware acceleration is dependant upon vendors providing drivers, however. Most vendors have Win2K drivers out or in beta at present.

Yes there is support for OpenGL in win2K but the openGL 1.2 is only available when you install win2K Service pack 1… And of course you need some working drivers for your graphics card

1.2 might be out with service pack two (it aint out now tith sp1) but who gives flying f

hmmm you are wrong there, or I have got SP2 which hasn’t been released yet… because I’m using win2K and I have openGL 1.2

hmm, there is no info about opengl 1.2 on microsoft web site, why don’t you check the version number you get from
glGetString(GL_VERSION ) to make sure you have opengl 1.2.

I would be interested to have the headers and libraries for that!!

Nomaden: Maybe the drivers for card support OpenGL 1.2. But I’m pretty sure you MS renderer (Microsoft’s software) doesn’t. And if your MS renderer doesn’t have the functionpointers, you can’t use OpenGL 1.2 (unless you load the functions yourself, but then it works like extensions).

You need a new opengl32.dll that support the OpenGL 1.2 functionpointers in your systemdirectory to be able to “just call” OpenGL 1.2-specific functions without messing with pointers.

Has anyone tried compiling a new opengl32.dll with Mesa? Doesn’t Mesa support OpenGL 1.2?

thanks for all the info…

is opengl32.dll the only file needed for a game to run on OpenGL. if that is the case why not pack the dll file with the game and unpack it into the user’s systems folder?
would that work?

PS it would make much more sense if MS would include OpenGL with DirectX drivers. but like always those A**holes wants to control everybody like sheep.

I’m really sick and tired of hearing of how big ass-holes MS are. How about you ppl slap around Tux sometimes and realise that MS still has the best OS for the average user in spite of their bugs.
OpenGL isn’t a part of directX and shouldn’t be installed with it, and openGL is supposed to come with your graphicscard drivers in the form of opengl32.dll i believe.

[This message has been edited by Blaze (edited 08-27-2000).]

opengl32.dll is NOT supposed to be shipped with the hardware manufacturers drivers. And neither should you pack it into your game, and unpack it into the users systemdirectory. The last statement is just because of three things I can come up with at the moment.

1: The whole idea behind dll files is NOT to do this.

2: Win2k (maybe other NT’s as well) protects dlls in you systemdirectory, and they will be restored next time you start your computer, if not immediately (I had severe problems poking with my opengl32.dll, everytime I deleted/moved/renamed/replaced is, it showed up in it’s original form).

3: If the user got a working opengl32.dll, and you replace it with a dll that doesn’t on thre users platform, the user probably will get pissed.

Yeah u are right… I was talking about hardware openGL 1.2 and that I started having when I used SP1, without SP1 it was ver 1.1

Originally posted by Nomaden:
Yeah u are right… I was talking about hardware openGL 1.2 and that I started having when I used SP1, without SP1 it was ver 1.1

Are you really sure about this ? What file version does the DLL have ?

MS said they wouldn’t introduce new functionalities with service packs anymore. OpenGL 1.2 wouldn’t fit that profile. I also can’t find any opengl32.dll in the changed file list or in my backup directory.

If your gl version string returns 1.2 it is because your graphics card has a driver which supports 1.2 but your still compiling against the MS 1.1 version.

I hope that is they do make a 1.2 DLL it is not gonna be part of a Win2k service pack but just an all windows versions download. OpenGL works on all windows versions, I hope they keep it that way…

in the download section on this site there is a source code that you can use that checks what ver opengl32.dll is, and replaces it if needed. what do you think of this one?

BTW, Blaze, you’re right in saying that MS has the best OS (don’t forget the only OS!!) for the average person, spite their bugs (lots of them). but lemme ask you: if you had the power to make an OS, wouldn’t you make a better one. I know I would.

Personally I think that win98 stinks, but it is 5years old now (win95 was worse than win98). And I actually like my win2000 and it never crashes on my pc, some of the programs crash(some of the programs dont work at all, due to bad programmers), but the os is very stable.

Don’t forget, if you place an opengl.dll into the game directory, that will override the one in the system directory, therefore allowing you to have more than one version on your system (remember, it searches CWD for DLLs before going to System).

That’s what companies like Ravensoft do for Aureal drivers, and why they had some issues with SoF A3D because the version they had was older than what most people had on their system. IIRC (and I could be wrong) some companies DO bundle their own OGL drivers with their game.

Don’t forget, if you place an opengl.dll into the game directory, that will override the one in the system directory, therefore allowing you to have more than one version on your system (remember, it searches CWD for DLLs before going to System).

That’s what companies like Ravensoft do for Aureal drivers, and why they had some issues with SoF A3D because the version they had was older than what most people had on their system. IIRC (and I could be wrong) some companies DO bundle their own OGL drivers with their game.

I don’t know much but I will try to explain my experience for u anyways.

I’m running win2k and I have a TNT2 ultra. I installed the newest drivers for my card (det3 ver. 6.18) and when I did a get string it told me I used openGL ver 1.1 (hardware), and then I installed SP1 for win2K and did a getstring again and it told me openGL ver 1.2(hardware)… I did this “operation” because a guy from work told me about the newer version of openGL with win2K…

Okay here is how I see it.
I have been programming OpenGL for some years now on Win98. When i switched to Win2k
all my programs did only work with Software rendering on version 1.1 that is because the pixelformat was not supportet on hardware, but when i installed SP1 (yes thats Service Pack 1) I got Hardware support on version 1.2.

and another thing for a long time ago before Win2k was released everybody said “OpenGL won’t be supported on Win2k” well I was programming OpenGL on Win2k Beta 2 and Microsoft stated that the existing Link library (that is the opengl32.dll) will be shiped with Win2k, and version 1.2 would be in a service release (SP1).

// csSniperWolf

Well, even though OpenGL 1.2 is included in SP1 or not, the most important thing is still missing… the libraryfiles and the headerfiles. Without them, you can’t develop program for OpenGL 1.2 (unless you want to mess with functionpointers and do your own #defines and prototypes).

First of, look at http://www.microsoft.com/Industry/media/articles/opengl.asp.

Secondly, Microsoft stated a little while back that OpenGL 1.2 will not be available until service pack 2.

Anyways… thats it.

Siwko