Hi all!
At last I got a new graphic card (Radeon 9800Pro 256MB)
and get WATER REFLECTION! Finally… and sooo beautiful!
My old GeForce4 Ti 4600 didn’t produce that kind of wonder…
But when I save an exe for windows, and run it on my pc…
NO water reflection! And that pc have an Asus AX800 PRO 256MB
graphic card…
Hmm… What have I missed?
I assume that this effect is possible on windows…?
Please help…
Do you have an ancient version of Direct X? That may be the case; I don’t know a whole lot about PCs…
Just a thought.
Actually, we use OpenGL…
But you should try to update your opengl drivers - ATI had some very fckd drivers, so we had to disable the water to avoid spurious crashes on older versions
Yes, some of the effects are disabled because we detect a buggy driver version. It’s better to turn something off than crash, right?
In ATI case, vertex programs (and hence reflective water) is disabled on Catalyst 5.5 or older drivers. Try installing recent ones from www.ati.com (or maybe Asus has the new drivers as well)
Even on windows? 
Thought you only used OpenGL for mac builds.
Now that I think about it that wouldn’t work at all for webplayers etc.
I was on the right track though… 
(Sorry, a little off topic)
Any ideas on when a new version of OpenGL is going to be released for mac?
Virtually every OS update has a new version. Since 10.4.8 was released a few days ago, that has the newest version. (Which apparently has multi-threaded OpenGL enabled, though Apple seems to be secretive about it for some reason.)
–Eric
Ah I see. I wonder if Apple will actually make a big deal of OpenGL (and not be so behind-the-scenes) now that they themselves are working on it. I guess that will only happen if the next huge version of OpenGL (in Leopard?) is released.
And hooray for multi-threaded OpenGL! Anyone seen any vast improvments first hand? A while ago I heard that this could help performance a great deal, even up to factors of 2… I haven’t heard anything recently that clarifies this.
OpenGL just got upped from 1.5 version (10.4.7) to 2.0 version (10.4.8) on my MacBookPro. That said, it’s not a huge difference, basically just a couple of extensions were added. I tend to believe it does not have this fancy multithreading stuff yet (at least on this machine).
I doubt there will be a significant OpenGL improvement in Leopard (when it comes to features; performance can always be improved of course). Hey, the very latest GL version is 2.1; and GL 3.0 is still far away. Oh well.
And yes, we use OpenGL both on Macs and Windows. If you think of it, using different APIs would at least make a lot of shaders not “just work” on both platforms. Or require shader authors to write multiple (even if almost identical) versions.
According to Glenda Adams (Aspyr), 10.4.8 does indeed have multithreaded OpenGL. It doesn’t magically make everything faster–you have to specifically enable it. (Heard elsewhere: something to do with calling CGLEnable() … whatever that is; I know nothing about programming OpenGL.) Apparently Doom3 works with it (somehow, despite last being updated in February) and gets a 26% increase in speed at low (640x480) resolutions, with correspondingly less speed increase the higher the resolution. So, not exactly the wished-for 2X speed. However, that’s just one case; maybe other games can take advantage of it better. Or maybe Unity can. 
–Eric
Hello, gays… Just want to say, the water reflection work now…
Updated Catalyst and there it was… water…water…mmm
Now You can continue your
well-over-my-head-discussion-of-multi-threaded-OpenGL-thing…
What IS that? Guess it not so easy to explain…
Thank You for Your help!
/errormaker
Multitheaded OpenGL in Mac OS X is supposed to magically increase the performance on machines with more than one CPU (i.e. on all recent machines).
…and I wouldn’t call everyone in this tread a gay. Maybe some aren’t!
lol… sorry! I mean guys… :lol:
Aha… Multitheaded… ok.
… and there is currently very little documentation freely available (ie. through google) that explains how it works or how to use it.
Although it does indeed seem to be available in 10.4.8