[Bf-committers] Proposal: Up blender requirements to OpenGL 2.1

Antony Riakiotakis kalast at gmail.com
Tue Dec 30 16:49:01 CET 2014


Hello again,

The times of fixed function OpenGL pipeline have been very fun and
happy, with coders trying to ingeniously hack the fixed function
parameters to do the things they wanted.

But I believe we are getting to the point where fixed function OpenGL
starts holding us back. We already require GLSL support for some of
the fancier features of blender, but probably it's time to feel free
to consider shaders as the primary display mechanism if we want to,
without needing to code fallbacks to a fixed function alternative.

Especially anything that requires mixing multiple textures (such as
texture painting with masks or brush overlays) or attributes in a non
standard way is difficult without shaders.

This is scheduled to happen as part of the viewport refactor, but
having the hardware requirements there will enable us to do more
improvements now.

The proposal is not about throw away every legacy path next release,
rather than assuming that users will need to have access to newer
hardware from now on if they wish to access core features. Shader
availability can be tested to avoid crashes but no alternative
rendering path should be provided for those not meeting the
requirements.


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