Visualization Library Alpha 2 Is Out

By DE Editors

A Mandelbrot fractal animated and rendered in real time on the GPU using a GLSL fragment shader.

Visualization Library is an open source C++ middleware for 2D and 3D graphics applications based on OpenGL 2.1,  designed to develop portable applications for the Windows XP, Windows Vista and Linux/X11 operating systems.

The company also just announced that Visualization Library Alpha 2.1 has been released and the new website includes instructions to compile Visualization Library with CMake using Visual Studio. MinGW and Linux/GCC have been added with a simple “spinning cube” example in the “Quick Start” section. Plus,  a forum section has been added.

Visualization Library Alpha 2 is said to be closer to the metal rendering architecture, with native Win32, SDL, GLUT and Qt4 bindings; improved compatibility with 3DS, OBJ,  AC3D, MD2 and PLY files; a powerful Image class with out of the box support to DDS, BMP, TIF, TGA, DAT and raw files; support to the latest OpenGL 2.1/3.0 extensions including geometry shaders, integer textures and multi-instancing;  and more.

Visualization Library’s aim is to help the OpenGL programmer by providing a versatile and reusable set of tools that boost the project’s development and ease the application’s life cycle. By adopting Visualization Library instead of plain OpenGL the developer is immersed in a fully C++ object-oriented framework, which provides a safer, quicker, and more intuitive way of managing common OpenGL tasks. Like OpenGL, Visualization Library does not provide special multithreading support or a multithreading library. It is the user’s responsibility to take care of the various aspects involved in the development of a multithreaded or distributed application. However, Visualization Library has been designed to minimize multithreading-related issues as much as possible. If you are seriously interested in multithreading programming you probably want to have a look at Intel Threading Building Blocks (Intel TBB).

For details, contact Visualization Library.

Sources:  Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.