Looking for a small, light scene graph style abstraction lib for shader based OpenGL

Posted by Pris on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Pris
Published on 2012-06-30T18:19:13Z Indexed on 2012/06/30 21:26 UTC
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I'm looking for a 'lean and mean' c/c++ scene graph library for OpenGL that doesn't use any deprecated functionality. It should be cross platform (strictly speaking I just dev on Linux so no love lost if it doesn't work on Windows), and it should be possible to deploy to mobile targets (ie OpenGLES2, and no crazy mandatory dependencies that wouldn't port well to modern mobile frameworks like iOS, Android, etc), with a license that's compatible with closed source software (LGPL or more liberal).

Specific nice-to-haves would be:

  • Cameras and Viewers (trackball, fly-by, etc)
  • Object transform hierarchies (if B is a child of A, and you move A, B has the same transform applied to it)
  • Simple animation
  • Scene optimization (frustum culling, use VBOs, minimize state changes, etc)
  • Text

I've played around with OpenSceneGraph a lot and it's pretty amazing for fixed function pipeline stuff, but I've had a few of problems using it with the programmable pipeline and after going through their mailing list, it seems several people have had similar issues (going back years).

Kitware's VES looks neat (http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VES), but VES + VTK is pretty heavy. VTK is also typically for analyzing scientific data and I've read that it's not that appropriate for a general use case (not that great at rendering a lot of objects on scene,etc)

I'm currently looking at VisualizationLibrary (http://www.visualizationlibrary.org/documentation/pag_gallery.html) which looks like it offers some of the functionality I'd like, but it doesn't explicitly support mobile targets.

Other solutions like Ogre, Horde3D, Irrlicht, etc tend to be full on game engines and that's not really what I'm looking for.

I'd like some suggestions for other libraries that I may have missed... please note I'm not willing to roll my own solution from scratch.

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