[HOpenGL] Texture Rectangle support

Sven Panne Sven.Panne at aedion.de
Wed May 13 15:08:39 EDT 2009


Am Sonntag, 10. Mai 2009 14:00:19 schrieb Sven Panne:
> [...] I haven't released
> a new version on Hackage yet, because the support for generic vertex
> attributes (something totally unrelated to rectangular textures) hasn't
> been finished yet.
>
> To explain this a bit more: I'm a bit reluctant to release an API which
> might immediately change in the next release. The tricky part here is that
> OpenGL 3.1 differentiates between 3 ways of handling integral vertex
> attributes: Conversion to normalized floating point, conversion to
> unnormalized floating point, and keeping integral values. [...]

Reading the OpenGL spec very closely, one can see that the story is even more 
complicated: OpenGL distinguishes 3 kinds of generic vertex attributes: 
floating point, signed integral and unsigned integral. Integral values used 
for floating point attributes can be interpreted normally (i.e. value-
preserving) or as normalized values. If this sounds confusing: Yes, it is! :-) 
Add to this a highly non-orthogonal API, and you have a perfect mess... A 
complete re-specification of OpenGL 4.0 (if this ever happens) instead of the 
agglomeration of 1-2 decades of incremental changes would be great.

Nevertheless, I've tried to make this a bit clearer and orthogonal, and the 
result is in the OpenGL package repository. Things are not really perfect, 
because I want to preserve API backwards compatibility. When I find the time 
for a OpenGL-3.x-only package, things can be vastly simplified and would be 
more elegant. Nevertheless, some comments would be highly appreciated.

One note: I've just seen that in my released versions, I've accidentally 
exported VertexAttrib without its methods and VertexAttribComponent *with* its 
methods. This should of course have been the other way round. :-( For 
compatibility reasons I keep the latter as it is, though.

If there are no severe objections, I'll probably release a new version on 
Hackage in the next few days, including this stuff plus a few other additions 
and bug fixes.

Cheers,
   S.



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