Re: [AD] Incentive for adding support for user scanline renderers

[Jason Wilkins <fenix@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 22 Feb 2001, tom st denis wrote:

> Here's an incentive, I think it may be possible to make scanline
> renderers that use OpenGL.

This seems completely doable, but just how efficient would it be to draw a
triangle one scan line at a time, using OpenGL.

You could definitely get things like bilinear filtering, per-pixel
mipmapping, and such, which would be nice, but I would recommend writing a
3D engine which is portable on a much higher level (say, like my engine
which has a portable geometry format and a scripting language for shading.  
This means i can implement the actual drawing in DirectX, OpenGL, and
Allegro).

OpenGL is as easy, if not easier, to use than Allegro for 3D.  Once you
get your initialization code code out of the way (I wrote mine once, and
now reuse it), then an OpenGL program drawing something like a cube is
only half as long as the same program written in Allegro.