[Bf-committers] Replacing BGL with PyOpenGL

[Dahlia Trimble]

I remember I wanted to use PyOpenGL a while back for a blender addin script
idea I was toying with. At the time the support for python 3+ was quire
lacking and I was unable to get it to work. I have used PyOpenGL for an
earlier project based on python 2.7 and it worked quite well, however there
seemed to be a lot of overhead and it would bog down quite a bit after just
a few hundred GL calls per frame. I hope it's improved since then.


On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 1:59 AM, Mitchell Stokes <mogurijin at gmail.com> wrote:

> BGL is a Python wrapper for OpenGL that is maintained by Blender.
> Unfortunately, it is stuck on approximately OpenGL 1.1 level features with
> some shader calls also exposed. It could be updated to support newer OpenGL
> features (at least having vertex arrays would be nice), but there really is
> not much need to maintain our own OpenGL wrapper. PyOpenGL[0] supports
> Python 3.3+, and could be used as a replacement for BGL (in other words,
> deprecate BGL and ship Blender with PyOpenGL).
>
> Pros:
>   * Someone else would be maintaining the wrapper
>   * PyOpenGL uses ctypes and the same package can be used for multiple
> platforms
>
> Cons:
>   * Yet another Python package for us to ship with Blender
>   * Adds to Blender's size
>   * Some APIs may need to be updated (bge.texture and Image.gl_load come to
> mind)
>
> What are some other people's thoughts on this?
>
> --Mitchell Stokes
>
> [0] http://pyopengl.sourceforge.net/
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