Be Engineering Insights: The DR8 Graphics World
By Pierre Raynaud-Richard
In the upcoming release of the BeOS™, Developer Release 8 (DR8), we introduce two new kits and assorted new and improved API to help satisfy the needs of developers who work and play in the graphics world. The new kits are:
The Game Kit, our first pass at delivering specialized API that fits the needs of digital game designers
The 3D Kit, an “in-box” solution for designing, rendering, and interacting with three-dimensional figures and settings
This article gives an overview of the design philosophies and features of these two kits and also looks, briefly, at the state of the graphics card API. If you want to read more (much more) about the 3D Kit, visit the Be world-wide web site, where you’ll find a new 3D Kit white paper (http://www.be.com/developers/3DWhitePaper.html).
But first, you may have read that Be has recently licensed OpenGL®, the popular 3D programming interface. The implementation of OpenGL® that we’ll initially support is based on the latest library and toolkit from Silicon Graphics. Unfortunately, the implementation won’t be ready until after DR8. In the future, we’ll optimize our OpenGL® implementation for the BeBox: We’ll drop into assembly language for critical sections, support accelerated 3D graphic cards, and provide parallel 3D processing.