[maemo-developers] Fremantle OpenGL wrapper?

[From: Quim Gil]

Qole, see what you are doin'.  :)

ext Qole wrote:
> Kimmo and Quim:
> 
> First of all: I did not start this thread as an attack on the Maemo
> team, nor was my comment, "that's disappointing," meant as an attack. It
> is a simple statement of fact; it is disappointing to me that Maemo 5
> does not yet have the infrastructure in place to be able to run
> hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in OpenGL ES applications.
> 
> To me, this is a very important feature for any future device, and I was
> disappointed that this is not apparently a high priority within Maemo.

This is a developers list and you were disappointed by the answer of a
developer telling you that the technologies involved are all open source
so anybody can contribute to the solution.

Kimmo and Kate are giving technical details telling that the enablers
are in place and they need fine tuning. They also tell you that such
wrapper can be developed by anybody (with the knowledge and the time, sure).

No matter how high the priority of your request would be, having the
official release and developer offering tops (logically) the priority.
Besides, based on this thread you are making your own conclusions in
talk.maemo.org about the status of the release etc.


> I really want the next Maemo device to succeed, and one of the first
> things the gadget blogs and technophiles will want to see is the games.
> This means making Maemo 5 games friendly, and to me that means making it
> easy to port existing OpenGL games to Maemo 5.

We also want the next Maemo device to succeed and we have a list of
priorities to make this happen. Any input is welcome and your point is
taken. Now, please let's move on.

Qole, basically you came to a developers list with a user request
(OpenGL based games are important and Maemo 5 should be ready for them),
you got valuable feedback from Nokia developers but you are still
pushing your agenda without getting in development/technical details and
you are extending your disappointment here to threads of (mainly user)
speculation in tmo.

My recommendation is to follow this discussion in talk.maemo.org or
maemo-users if you prefer.


> I don't know the internal workings of Maemo, and perhaps you have a good
> strategy in place for games; I was thinking purely of porting existing
> Linux games that were written for OpenGL. So I began thinking of what
> needed to be in place for this porting to be done.

Developers can do this.

> I also admit I might have been influenced by the video of Quake3 on the
> Pandora. :-)

Pandora is a gaming device, so they better have the gaming enablers in
place.

> I also don't expect Maemo to port the games, I'm just concerned that the
> path will be too thorny to encourage others to do it.

Right. Why don't you ask this in the OpenGL community? It's not Maemo
who defines the gaps and incompatibilities between OpenGL flavors and
versions. THAT would definitely help the success of the next Maemo
device much more than putting more pressure in our developers.

-- 
Quim Gil
open source advocate
Maemo Devices @ Nokia