[osg-users] Investigating using OSG as a graphics backend for our real-time physics simulation system

[Andy Somogyi]

Hi All, 

We're evaluating using OSG as a possible graphics backend for our real-time physics simulation project, and I've got a few questions:

* We suport Mac, Windows and Linux, how good is cross-platform support with OSG?

* It looks like it’s pretty easy is it to hook up Magnum to an existing native window, just would like to confirm. Say on Windows, I create a new Win32 window, or on Mac I create a Cocoa window, is it possible to hook up OSG to that window. I know that I'll have to grab the window events (mouse, resize, etc...) in my app and forward them to OSG, that's not a big deal. We'll be using the native toolkit on each platform for the gui, i.e. WPF on Windows, Cocoa on Mac and GTK on Linux, so it's important that we can hook up our rendering code to native windows. 

* Much of our application will entail displaying highly dynamic deformable elastic surfaces and particle systems with programmatically generated textures, do you thing OSG is a good fit? Does OSG have mesh node types where it’s easy from the CPU side to update vertex positions and add/remove vertices? 

* We also plan to do a bit of 2D drawing (objects in a tree structure), How easy would it be to also use OSG for 2D trees?  

* I think a scene graph approach would be a good fit for us, as I’ve worked a lot with open inventor in the past. Part of what we'll be doing will be constructive solid geometry, similar to OpenSCAD, http://www.openscad.org, and a scene graph we think is a good way to represent this kind of geometry. There are however some criticisms of scene graphs, namely Tom Forsythe’s blog: http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BScene%20Graphs%20-%20just%20say%20no%5D%5D

I would tend to disagree with Jon, as I conceptualize things in space as all relative to the original, and things relative to each other (I worked with robotic arm manipulation before, so I tend to think in terms of transforms). How would you guys respond do Jon’s issues? 

* It would appear that Apple, in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm) is slowly deprecating OpenGL in favor of metal. In the future, do you think OSG could have different backends (metal, directx)? 

Thanks, 
-- Andy