[ODE] Linux binaries and straight Open API demos...

[Nate W]

On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Dominique Louis wrote:

> Secondly, I noticed that most the demos that ship with ODE use the 
> "drawstuff" library. So has anyone worked on some straight OpenGL API 
> demos that make use of ODE. I would like to have a look at a very basic 
> demo to see how you have gone about it rather than making use of the 
> "drawstuff" library.

Drawstuff is a pretty thin wrapper around the OpenGL API.  It could be a
little more basic than that, but not much.  OpenGL is such a low-level
API, it doesn't make much sense to use it without something roughly
equivalent to drawstuff.  Drawstuff consists of little more than functions
that bundle together the necessary OpenGL calls to get basic things done,
like lighting the scene, drawing the ground plane, and so on.  There's a
tiny amount of extra "complexity" to call platform-specific code in a few
places, but that's about it.

As an exercise you might find it helpful to design your own framework and
use code from drawstuff where you need OpenGL stuff.  That's kinda how my
adventure with ODE started...  At this point, I think the capped-cylinder
function is the only thing from drawstuff I'm still using, but drawstuff
was pretty helpful when I was starting out with ODE and OpenGL.

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com