OpenGL Library for Delphi, maintained by Eric Grange, based on Mike Lischke's GLScene. unique hits since 13/04/00

2002 News Archive - Back to Current News

Things have been slow on the website recently, with a poll issue (the poll to the right is just a placeholder), but there is quite some activity going in the newsgroups, in the CVS, and several projects I'll try to highlight in the next update... sometime next year!
Released a few days ago, linked just in time from this page is a little Christmas screen-saver, showcases one of the recent additions: LensFlares. GeForce or Radeon recommended!

A new GLScene source snapshot can be downloaded here (2.4 Mb). It's a development release, tested quickly on Delphi 6 only. It includes all the changes, additions and fixes since v0.9b for those that don't use the CVS. Be aware the name standardization has begun, many components had their names changed (prefixed).
To 'upgrade' your projects automatically to the new names, you can download a MassReplace utility, which will convert your '.pas' and '.dfm' (text or binary) to the new names. Making a backup of your sources is strongly advised before performing the mass replace, just in case ;)
Btw, the MassReplace utility is always updated when CVS renames happen, so, CVS users, should you encounter renamed components, re-download the utility, the name changes list in the zip will be up-to-date.

Some recents and not-so-recent newsbits:
• gameprog.it added an introduction to GLScene (in italian), written by Stefano SteO Arcidiacono (reported by DarkSSJ in the NG)
• Sternas Stefanos announced a new version of Cosmos4D, an application that allows to author 3D multimedia worlds/scenes and export them as an executable or screensaver.
• Ivan Lee Herring released DTM 1.3, a Digital Terrain Mapping application, that can produce Elevation Tints, Slope Tints, Contours, Line of Sight, LOS Masked Areas, and 3D Flyby Perspective, etc.
• Marcus Oblak opened new forums at PlasmaCode where you can discuss D-Robots coding, and is now accepting Robots code submissions!

The poll on graphics boards manufacturer has been closed, with nVidia being in a whoopin' 70.2% of the visitor's machines, ATI lagging at 16.7%, followed by 'others' at 7.3%, Matrox at 3.9% and Intel at 2.0%, these figures out of 920 votes. Hmmm... so the new poll focuses on those 70%, what nVidia board do you have? GF4 Ti/GF3? GF4 MX/GF2? GF1? TNT? older?

Finally, the CVS has now accumulated a significant amount of changes/additions/fixes since v0.9 (latest being a new 'FlatText' component), a work-in-progress release should be out next week, with the first of a new set of 'Advanced Demos'.

Marcus (Mrqzzz) recently released D-Robots, a "code-war" game in which you have to code in DWS a bot AI, bots then battle it in an arena rendered in real-time with GLScene. Go check the PlasmaCode website for more details!

Mattias Fagerlund keeps enhancing the ODE port, and in between updates found time to post two evolving creatures, "Hopper" and "Snake", based on physical ODE-based simulation and rendered with GLScene.

Finally, a note about CVS version happenings: name standardization is underway, a mass-replace utility/file is linked in the newsgroup along with other dirty details. Other recent noteworthy additions:

• WindowsFont component (based on code by Joen Joensen), allows use of TrueType fonts with THudText (optimizing use of texture memory).
• ShadowPlane scene object, you can see it in action in Mattias's ODE demos
• GUI components (by Joen Joensen, based on code by Jan Horn), early version of components that allow designing and interactive with OpenGL forms, buttons, edits, etc.

Mattias Fagerlund has started work on Delphi support of ODE to Delphi and GLScene, the current version can be found here, the port is evolving fast with new demos and additions almost daily (check the newsgroups for details). ODE is an 'Open Dynamics Engine' by Russell Smith, it allows impressive real-time physics and the demos in Matthias' port will surely convince you of that if needs be : )
UPDATE: There is now a small homepage for DelphiODE.

Erdely Laszlo let me know he started a Rebellion 2 project (the 1st Rebellion was a space-tactical combat game from LucasArts), there are a few screenshots and an announced demo.

Finally, the 'name standardization' poll apparently had 24.1% of you wondering what it could be, but with 54.9% of 'yes', 19.1% of 'where needed' and only 1.9% of 'no' out of 162 votes, I'll be going forward without much remorse. Changes will take place in the CVS with a small doc listing the old/new names placed here.
The new poll concerns what graphics hardware (brand actually) you use, some upcoming GLScene additions will have some hardware-specificity in them, and knowing their potential 'audience' should help.

A small issue sneaked by in v0.9 for Delphi7, the main download has been updated, and you can get a small fix here (13kB). No need to update or fix if you're not using Delphi 7.

Ivan Lee Herring announced the release of DTM (with source), a Digital Terrain Mapping application with "image processing procedures and many GLScene demos conglomerated into this program (Erics viewer and Nelsons Panoramic viewer...)".

Finally the Poll "Of what 'kind' is your 'main' GLScene project?" ended with quite balanced results, of 831 votes, 39.2% went to "Game", 19.6% to "Industrial", 17.8% for "Scientific", 5.8% for "School" and "17.6%" for "Getting started". That makes "game" and "serious" application almost ex-aequo, which is... interesting :)

A new poll begins on the dreaded question of unit and class name standardization: how would you perceive it? (it would mean having to adapt your apps and perhaps DFMs...)

Finally! GLScene v0.9 is out and available for download here (2.9 MB), several issues were fixed, nothing major. It is as stable as v0.9 may get, and new additions will now be added or be "hyped" some more in the next months (shaders, GUI, verlets, BSP...). The "main" change since the last RC is support for Delphi 7.
Thanks to all those who helped!

A new addition to the Gallery has been made, for "Kareo" and "Keops", bathroom and kitchen designers respectively by Ilker Yigit.

New poll, news and updates in the next post. Ad interim, nice week end!

v0.9RC2 is now available for download here (2.8 MB), unless nasty issues are discovered, this is probably the last version before "Official" v0.9.

A screenshot from a mill simulator application written by Safak Cinar has been added to the gallery, 'IMS', excerpt:

IMS is a basic 3-axis mill simulator. It works by rasterizing the tool tip profiles into brushes and essentially "drawing" on the stock raster with those. [...]
Since writing the display code using GLScene was lightning fast, the whole project took less than a week to complete. Actually the first build was up and running in 1/2 hr, thanks to GLScene![...]
More details and a high-res shot in the gallery entry.

First, a not-so-recent news that got stuck in a time warp (I forgot...). Christian Jerasch announced NeoSpace4D, which uses GLScene:
Do you want to create your own 3D worlds? Without great programming knowledge? You think that's not possible? You're wrong! Neospace4D is opening new dimensions!
The URL is www.silverfox-interactive.com and offers a video trailer (60MB).

SDS released some new screenshots for AntiTerror, with shadow and lighting effects, give them a look.

Ivan Lee Herring, who maintains a page on the DEM/DTM and other related terrain mapping and rendering subjects, has release a DTM app:

I have written a Digital Terrain Mapping app available with source code (program, source)
It is probably more of a grab-bag of parts for other GLScene users. Of most use would be the various DEM importers.
The application is built ontop of the HTF utility, but adds a lot of import capabilities. Now time to work again on the HTF/HDS for the terrain renderer...

Finally, I got tired of my previous mesh viewer app and packed a quicker 3D mesh viewer, GLSViewer (395 kB) to ease and speedup browsing those meshes I collected from the web ; )
The source is available (12 kB) and requires GraphicEx, RxLib and Delphi6 to compile (as well as GLScene, of course!).

The last bit for a "complete" v0.9 has been added to the CVS: multi-pass support for shaders and materials.
A new "materials/multipass" demo showcases its use for wireframe hidden-lines rendering, with a simple (reusable) shader.
Several other issues in v0.9RC1 were also solved, and v0.9RC2 should be out soon.

The previous poll results for "Which Delphi version are you using GLScene with?" were a whoopin' victory with 55.7% for Delphi6, followed by 35.4% for Delphi5, 4.9% for Delphi4 and Kylix taking the last 4.0% out of 551 votes.
A new poll is up regarding what "main" project you use GLScene for.

First two user projects updates:
• Virtual Atlas of the Moon is a free software for moon observation or survey by Patrick Chevalley and Christian Legrand, using GLScene for the 3D part (and Patrick just contributed a fix for Kyro!)
• Andrew from AntiTerror has released several new screenshots showcasing his progress (AntiTerror is a quite advanced Counter-Strike like game project)

Finally, I've added to the downloads unsupported Win32 binaries (1.1 MB) for Mesa 4.0.2! CVS has been updated to support the Mesa DLL. This is a pure-software implementation (ie. slow), it is unsupported (stated again), but if you're after non-realtime OpenGL graphics it means OpenGL 1.3 support "everywhere" (cube maps, multitexturing...). Place the DLL in your app's directory, don't replace the Microsoft one with it!

v0.9RC1 is now available for download here (2.8 MB) as a single zip including sources, demos, optional DLLs and updated doc.

Poll results are stacking up... I'll let it live a few more days, but Delphi4 support will probably be dropped after v0.9, unless someone volunteers for regular compatibility testing and udpating.

Just added a small poll (thanks Daniel Baulig!) feature. Several polls will take place in the next weeks reguarding what is used, and eventually, what may be dropped/altered severely. First poll deals with Delphi version support (D4 being the one at risk).

I'll release v0.9RC1 probably by monday. Recent bits that are not/will not be part of RC1 (though available via the CVS):

• CgShaders, the high level interface is basicly complete, but the component will not be integrated to a dpk until nVidia releases the final version. However, just add the unit to a dpk and you'll see the component. (generic shaders are part of v0.9RC1, they'll get a basic demo)
• Verlet units, by Mattias Fagerlund, allowing dynamic cloth simulation and other variations. Integration in GLScene is under way, if you can't wait go get them directly from the NG!
• Background images (static backgrounds, saving/restoring color/depth information)

I'll first start with a link to Marios Karagiannis's B-Tree Compiler, it's an expression parser that builds a 3D representation of the derived B-Tree: I have been using GLScene to create a 3D B-Tree compiler for the IT Univ in Athens, Greece and I uploaded the final program with full source code to my programming site.

The other newbit deals with Cg and shader support in GLScene. Generic shader support as just been added to the CVS, and experimental work as begun on Cg shaders support. Things are shaping well and here is a small test case along with an early version of the CgShader component (uses "beta" version of Alexey Barkovoy's Cg conversion, you'll also need the Cg toolkit and... a GF3/GF4). It implements a variation of the "simple.cg" demo.

Todays news items are:
• Electricity Tycoon by Thomas Mager, a nice game in which you have to take care of providing electricity to German citizen, avoid nuclear meltdowns and other bird problems ;) (in German)
• Mrqzzz many of you may know from teh newsgroups opened the GLScene back bone, "a place for GLScene users to exchange knowledge", go check it!
• Changes to CVS: fixed recently added issue with the terrain renderer, added support for per-tile-textures in the terrain engine, added TGLCustomHDS and synthterr demo (ugly, but to the point, I hope)

Finally, head over to the 'general' newsgroup if you're interested in getting GLScene CVS access. On top of the "seeked" list is... a CVS admin to properly setup rights and other admin thingies.

Still crawling the newgroups announces and trying to keep up... Here are some of the oldest announces and releases (added to the gallery, check it for more details and screenshots):
• MineSweeper 3D by Mattias Fagerlund: a simple but complete MineSweeper clone in 3D with a variety of lighting and explosion effects.
• Cosmo3D by Sternas Stefanos, an ambitious Real time 3D, Animator, Multimedia Program, with Object Pascal scripting support.
• RotoSolid, by Stefano Arcidiacono, a modelling tool that generates solids by rotating a spline, a TRevolutionSolid on steroids with mesh export capability.
3rd batch next week: more projects and probably a code update or two... have a good week-end ;)

After a lengthy stasis, here is a little site update. As you are probably all already aware, Jan Horn, the man behind Sulaco and the Quake 2 to Delphi conversion project, recently passed away. He was a great contributor and member of the Delphi/3D/OpenGL community and will be dearly missed.

Recent updates:

• Changes made to the CVS: several fixes, new "hfpick" demo (picking and 3D painting an heightfield), BitmapFont/HudText color modulation (Nelson Chu, see interface/fontcolor) and GlyphsAlpha control
• FAQ has been updated (categories, new entries)
Further news and updates will come in the next days.

A new CVS Snapshot zip (2237 kb) is available, it also marks a temporary feature-freeze and serves as v0.9RC1, only bug fixes and Kylix compatibility changes will get in until v0.9 is out in hope of preventing the dreaded feature creep.

However, this version has many noticeable improvements, highlights:

• Octree-based collision detection, by Robert Hayes, with ray and sphere collision detection, illustrated by the new "collisions/octree" and "collisions/boxedin" demos (picture to the right and gallery entry).
• Graphics32/GLScene demo by Nelson Chu, shows how to use of a dynamic 2D fire as a real-time texture (requires Alex Denisov's Graphics32 library).
• MouseLook for TGLNavigator by Robert Hayes and Joen Joensen, see the improved meshes/actortwocam demo, another longtimer on the wish list.
• Mesh Explosion FX by Matheus, go to specialsFX/meshexplosion to see the mushroom explode! (hmm...)
• Skeletal animation demo made it in, see Trinity run and jump in "meshes/skeletal".

Other entries will be added to the gallery while the bug hunt goes on, once things look stable enough, v0.9 will be released to the major Delphi repositories and we'll start adding heaps of new bu...er... features. ; )

Updates have been lagging somewhat lately... And they'll probably remain slow for the foreseeable future...
Here is a quickly packed batch:
• Kurushi, by Andrey Belash, a collect-the-gems game in 3D.
• Cosmos3D, by Sternas Stefanos, a 3D world editor with scripting support.
• ThreeDE, by Joen Joensen, has reached "alpha" stage (demo).

The terrain engine is now a working ROAM/Stripifier hybrid, and it is now fillrate limited from TNT2 to GF3 : )
It can be found in the CVS with other unrelated improvements (like EAX and FSAA support), leaving only converting the skeletal animation to quaternions as "big morsel" before releasing v0.9 beta.

Quick update with a new CVS zip (1960 kB), main changes:
• New context destruction mechanism, which should work around shortcomings of S3 and 3dfx drivers.
• Improved TSpaceText with alignement (by Sören Mühlbauer), fixed bug that prevented its use in RenderToBitmap
• New TGLTimeEventsMGR components with demo (movement/events, by GliGli)
• 3D sound support upgraded to BASS 1.4 and FMOD 3.4
• Several lesser/hideous/hidden/annoying bugs fixed

Philipp Pammler from www.exhausts.de released v0.4.3.1 of liquidgas (see post and link in the newsgroup for source), and is looking for input, give it a peek ;)

And finally here is VectorMath, this is a very early experimental version of a runtime-compiler for Vector Maths, more a "proof of concept" right now. Further versions of GLScene may base their math stuff on it... The idea is to compile SIMD-optimized ASM at runtime, thus maintaining a single, human-readable code base for FPU, 3DNow and SSE while achieving better-than-Delphi performance even when using FPU (ie. byebye inline asm).
In its current a state, only vector addition/subtraction/scaling is supported, but before adding more, I'm interested in SSE performance figures (and validity: couldn't test it... If you know some SSE asm and can help figure out issues there may be... the better). Generated FPU code is 10-20% faster than Delphi and 3DNow! twice as fast (on a K7, for K6, this is a whoopin' 5:1 ratio). If you happen to own a P3, P4 or Athlon XP, input on SSE would be welcome :)

A new fine "edutainment" piece from Eric Hardinge just came our way: Micrometer (zip, 271kb), this is a 3D simulator of... you guessed, a micrometer! (the world's first, if google is to be believed):
Here is an application which I hope ilustrates the accuracy and detail available using the GLScene components.
There is no help file but it should be relatively obvious to use.

The whole model is built entirely from GLScene components.

Time for a new CVS zip (1930 kB). What's new (what I remember):

• TGLFullScreenViewer for full-screen OpenGL with resolution change, showcased in "specialsFX/spiral" and "rendering/fullscreen".
• TGLCanvas for high-speed TCanvas-like 2D drawing, see "bench/canvas" and "rendering/fullscreen".
• New PFX manager: TGLLightPointPFXManager, comes with a new base class for texture-based particle systems.
• New PFX demo "specialsFX/spiral" (see the gallery) showing use of PFX with multiple life colors.
• New rotation methods, see updated "interface/camera" demo.

There were several structural improvements resulting in reduced memory usage and improved performance (if GLScene was the limiting factor, that is). Just a few figures, on my GF2, between september 2001 and now:


• megacube (16000 shaded cubes) jumped from 70 FPS to 139FPS
• volcano (7000+ blended particles) went from 65 FPS to 101 FPS

I'll also "feature-freeze" GLScene and wrap up a new "official" release (just noticed the last, v0.8.2, is almost a year-old...), last bits that'll get in will be: submitted ones that work directly, HTF Height data source and... Kylix support! Yes, thanks to efforts of puthoon, Kylix will have a windowed viewer (similar to Win32 TGLSceneViewer).

Here is what Stefan Bazelkov sent me from Bulgaria:



[...] I work on several projects with GLScene: Motion capture, 3D Scanner, Virtual gallery, Virtual TV Studio (with one of my colleague). This screenshots are from one of my projects. If someone wants to help me to continue the development I will send him the sourcecode. [...] Now the technical data =) for GLEditor:

1. Developed for level building.
2. Supports only external objects (3ds, obj ... and all that GLScene supports). Support for GLScene build-in objects can be added very easily.
   
3. Object editing (position, scale, rotation)
   
4. Supports texturing (load texture, texture properties - color,alpha ...)
   
5. Save and Load GLT files. A text format describing the scene.
Soon I'll be ready with the loading unit for GLScene, supporting loading GLT files. I'm sure that anyone who works with GLScene is capable to write a loader for GLT files, because it's self-explaning text-file format.

So, if you feel like giving a hand, get in touch with Stefan  ; )

To all of you, Happy New Yeark 2002! And... welcome to the Euro!  ; )

I uploaded a new CVS Snapshot with latest sources and demos, more than 60 now (added "collisions/meshhit" and "rendering/tobitmap"). There were several fixes and changes, no biggy. Be aware the Terrain Engine is under reconstruction, and may safely be qualified as "queer". The rest should be ok.

Old News: 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000