Thank you all for so many useful discussing.
It seems I have two choices. One is gtkglext, and another one is clutter.
I use osg as the scenegraph, so it seems that a simple OpenGL windows
with *configurable* (RGB or RGBA, double buffer or single buffer, etc.)
OpenGL setting is enough. And I also want the program can be run in both
Linux and windows system. The major problem is that I have tried to
compile gtkglext, but failed. The link
(http://www.bonifazi.eu/appunti/2008/02/gtk-glade-gtkglext-all-in-one-windows.html)
which provides the pre-compiled binary has broken.
Clutter is very interesting, since it seems will be a "standard" way to
use OpenGL in the future. If so, that's great, and I am willing to try
it. Because I use osg, the performance may not be a problem, since
clutter just providing a OpenGL rendering context. However I cannot find
a simple example, e.g. call OpenGL routines to render a cube in side of
the clutter, as the starting point. Where can I get more information
about this?
I love gtk, however, it is not so friendly to windows and OpenGL.
Best,
Jin
on 10/01/2010 01:03 AM, Emmanuele Bassi written:
On Thu, 2010-09-30 at 16:08 +0100, Jeremy Henty wrote:
I would *not* recommend using clutter for 3D modeling software.
neither would I.
At
work I recently had to profile various approaches to GTK canvases
(gdk, foocanvas, goocanvas, clutter, gtkglext). We write genome
browsers so we *have* to render thousands of items quickly. I imagine
3D modeling software would have similar constraints. We gave up on
clutter because of its performance. Not only did it render slowly but
creating a new clutter item was O(number of already existing items).
it's a scene graph: what did you expect? :-p
granted, we're using the painters algorithm when we should be using more
efficient ways of submitting geometry to the GPU - and we're working
into implementing that[0], but at the end of the day any actor needs to
be reachable through a graph.
if you want to draw elements you might want to use a single actor and
then use a VBO through the Cogl API - but, then again, you can use GL
directly with GtkGLExt.
it would make sense to use Clutter for the main modeling view if and
only if the rest of the application UI was using Clutter.
GtkGlext was the only approach that offered any hope of significantly
improving on good old foocanvas.
clearly, since you need to drop down into raw GL, and that's all
GtkGLExt provides.
Clutter seems to be focussed on eye-candy.
"eye-candy" has generally negative connotations. Clutter is meant to be
used to create compelling and dynamical user interfaces; it's an
equivalent to CoreAnimation on Quartz and WPF on Win32. would you create
a 3D modeling software using CALayers?
BTW, if you profile clutter then be careful: for most toolkits you
time the expose event handler, but in clutter that just sends an alert
to a separate clutter animation event stream and triggers a paint
event handler. Make sure you profile the right thing!
on X11 you get an expose event for real windows; in Clutter, the only
Window, as far as X11 is concerned, is the one implicitly created by a
Stage. gtk+ 2.x too has moved away from sub-windows; and in 3.x gtk
moves away from expose events delivered to widgets, in favour of a
Clutter-like approach of top-down "draw" calls sent to each widget.
ciao,
Emmanuele.
[0] http://wiki.clutter-project.org/wiki/Cogl_Render_Lists
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