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Diving into the OpenGL pool...

Thursday, 2 October 2003  |  jason harris

So, does anyone know any good resources for OpenGL programming under KDE? I've started looking at the Qt OpenGL examples, and that seems straightforward enough.

However, Someone at the dot told me about the Coin project, which is an implementation of SGI's high-level Open Inventor API for OpenGL. Even better, they have a library called SoQt which is supposed to let you easily make openGL Qt apps. I'd really like to try to use SoQt for KStars, but from what I have read so far, it isn't very flexible. You have to place "SoQt::init(argc,argv)" inside your app's main function, which instantiates a main window for drawing OpenGL stuff. This would seem to preclude making the window a KMainWindow. Is there a way to use SoQt to just make a widget, instead of a toplevel window? Also, it wasn't clearly stated, but I got the impression that it wasn't supported under Qt 3.x yet. Can anyone confirm/refute that?

Is it possible to just use Qt's QGLWidget and then make calls to coin's Inventor API, or do I have to do coin all the way?

I'd love to hear people's thoughts and opinions on SoQt, QGLWidget, GL vs. GLUT, ar any related options that I have yet to discover :). Thanks!