GL Galore is a plugin for Hollywood that allows you to access the OpenGL(R)
1.1 command set directly from Hollywood. This makes it possible to write
scripts that utilize the host system's 3D hardware to create high-performance,
butter-smooth 2D and 3D animation that is calculated completely in hardware
by the GPU of your graphics board. This leads to a huge performance boost
over the classic Hollywood graphics API which is mostly implemented in
software. Especially systems with slower CPUs will benefit greatly from
hardware-accelerated drawing offered by OpenGL.
OpenGL is a portable software interface to graphics hardware. It is
available for almost every platform in a variety of flavours. On AmigaOS and
compatibles, OpenGL is available as MiniGL on AmigaOS 4, TinyGL on MorphOS,
StormMesa on AmigaOS 3, and Mesa 3D on AROS. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
systems are usually shipped with an OpenGL driver already installed. More
information about OpenGL can be obtained from http://www.opengl.org. You can
find good tutorials about learning OpenGL all over the web.
There are two ways of using GL Galore: You can either access the OpenGL
1.1 API directly or you can use Hollywood's hardware brush functions without
making any direct calls to the OpenGL API. Whenever GL Galore is
activated, Hollywood hardware brushes are mapped directly to OpenGL textures
so they can be drawn and transformed in an extremely fast way on all
supported systems. This is especially useful on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
because Hollywood doesn't support hardware double buffers and brushes on
these platforms by default. With GL Galore, however, hardware double
buffers and brushes can be used on these platforms now too. So GL Galore
can also act as a helper plugin here which adds this functionality to
Hollywood without having you write a single line of OpenGL code to utilize
it!
On top of that, GL Galore offers wrapper functions for most commands of
the OpenGL 1.1 API. These commands are wrapped directly with little to no
changes to their original syntax. The only exception concerns OpenGL
commands that expect a pointer: In this case, GL Galore usually offers a
variant of the command so that it works with Hollywood tables. However, the
original pointer variant is also available in GL Galore and can be used
for time-critical scripts. Additionally, GL Galore also offers some
bridging functions that allow you to convert Hollywood brushes into OpenGL
textures and vice versa.
GL Galore can also be useful for rapidly prototyping software written in
OpenGL. People who used to program OpenGL using C will greatly appreciate
Hollywood's convenient multimedia API which offers functions for almost all
common tasks. For example, by using GL Galore to write OpenGL programs you
can avoid all the hassle of managing a GL window using one of the many
different toolkits out there. Also, jobs like image loading, sound or video
playback, font handling and image manipulation become ridiculously easy now
thanks to Hollywood's powerful command set which covers almost 700
functions.
GL Galore utilizes the new display adapter plugin interface introduced
with Hollywood 6.0. Thus, the plugin will not work with any older versions
of Hollywood. It requires at least Hollywood 6.0. Whenever GL Galore is
activated, all graphics output will automatically be routed through OpenGL.
To benefit from hardware acceleration, however, Hollywood scripts have to
follow some rules as described in this manual.
GL Galore comes with extensive documentation in various formats like PDF,
HTML, AmigaGuide, and CHM that contains a full OpenGL reference and
information about special functions in GL Galore. On top of that, many
example scripts are included in the distribution archive to get you started
really quickly.
All of this makes GL Galore the ultimate OpenGL scripting experience
combining the best of both worlds into one powerful plugin: Hollywood's
extensive and convenient multimedia function set and OpenGL's raw graphics
power!
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