Building a new opengl window manager

[avsa242]

gafferuk,

There were no example applications made with this that I could find, at a quick glance anyway, but this sounds like it could at least be close to what you're looking for...or maybe could give you some ideas:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/genfaq.html

It's a 3D toolkit from SGI (it's open source) called Open Inventor.
Good luck in any case...

Cheers,
Jesse

[gafferuk]

gafferuk,

There were no example applications made with this that I could find, at a quick glance anyway, but this sounds like it could at least be close to what you're looking for...or maybe could give you some ideas:

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/genfaq.html

It's a 3D toolkit from SGI (it's open source) called Open Inventor.
Good luck in any case...

Cheers,
Jesse

Thanks for the link, but again not what im looking for, reminds me of "open Scene Graph" which is what i used to create the screenshot from my past post.

The problem I currently have is theres only one window in order to do the graphics. So each running application must share this winow.

Im guessing ill have to use shared libries, shared memory and Semaphores to share this window? Is this normal? i just don't know.

Does anyone know a "standard" way for applications to share something like a window? I also need my GUI system to call each application in turn and get it to update it's graphics for each frame. So this communication I require seems so far to be 2 way.

Any ideas?

[Ant P.]

Do they all need to be in one window? Why not just render the 3D objects using RGBA visuals with an input mask?

[gafferuk]

Do they all need to be in one window? Why not just render the 3D objects using RGBA visuals with an input mask?

Mesa/OpenGL theres a display for each monitor, and one window for each display when it comes to window managers. This window provies the renering context to do the drawing. This context must be shared by all applcations.

Im a little confused by "Why not just render the 3D objects using RGBA visuals with an input mask?".
Can I render without a window?. Would make no difference though, as the rendering context still has to be shared by all applications.

Ive looked through the code of a lot of window managers but none are openGL/mesa based. I just don't know how to share the rendering context between applications other than shared memory in a shared library.

[gafferuk]

Did a search of google for "linux inter application communication" and came up with : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-p..._communication

Within it found : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Bus

Seems just what im looking for, used by both KDE and GNOME desktops. provided by freedesktop.org

[nhaehnle]

Mesa/OpenGL theres a display for each monitor, and one window for each display when it comes to window managers. This window provies the renering context to do the drawing. This context must be shared by all applcations.

Note that X has a concept of "display", and there is certainly not one display for each monitor. In a typical xrandr multi-monitor setup, the monitors all belong to the same display - that's why you can move windows seamlessly from one monitor to the other.