I came across a discussion thread somewhere, and it said that the entire graphical framework for the unity editor itself is running through OpenGL.
Is this true? Is the unity editor just one big OpenGL context?
I obsiouly can’t answer, as a Unity engineer would probably know more than I, but I would assume the controls are not rendered natively except for perhaps the menu bar.
It’s true, almost everything is rendered with OpenGL, though we have to use several OpenGL contexts. The exceptions are things like menus and file open dialogs.
On Windows we run DirectX instead of OGL, either DX 9 or DX 11 if you enable that in Player Settings in Unity 4. We actually support OpenGL as well, but chose DirectX because of better driver support.
Thank you for the insight Kaspar.
I have another question if you could answer. My brain keeps tugging me into this interest in low-level native UI framework programming for some reason, and I am trying to wrap my head around the whole thing.
Do you know if the entire OSX UI itself relies on OpenGL to be rendered?
I’ve searched and searched on this, but could never find a clear answer. Some people say Apple made some custom drawing library, and their own graphics driver, others say it is all OpenGL.
it is probably a wrapper over open GL i suppose.
OpenGL doesn’t make file menu’s etc. for you, only the renderer will use OpenGL then a framework built around it to manipulate GL. I use QTCreator and Visual studio with Xcode for Mac ports.
You can make a UI completely in QTCreator, although I’ve had issues with the compiler.
When OSX moved to quartz or whatever, the whole gui became an OpenGL context, afaik. Lots of stuff gets re-rendered every frame.