Introducing OpenGL - C# Game Programming: For Serious Game Creation - page 29

Unreal games. It is modeled on OpenGL and has the same state machine style
design and extension methods.
SDL, Simple Direct Media Layer, is a cross-platform library that supports input,
sound, and graphics. It's quite a popular library for game makers, especially for
independent and open source games. One of the more famous open source
games made with SDL is FreeCiv, a multiplayer Civilization clone. It's also used
in most Linux game ports.
PhysFs initially might sound like some kind of physics library, but it's a small IO
library. It allows all the game assets to be packaged in one big binary file or
several small ones. Many commercial games have similar systems; for example,
Doom 's wad system or Quake 's pak system. It allows games to be easily modified
and updated once released.
FreeGLUT is a free version of the OpenGL Utility Toolkit. This is a library that
has functions to get the user up and running with OpenGL right away. It has
methods for receiving input from the keyboard and mouse. It also has methods
for drawing various basic shapes, such as spheres, cubes, and even a teapot (this
teapot is quite famous in computer graphics and was modeled by Martin Newell
while at the University of Utah). The teapot is quite a complicated surface so it's
useful when testing new graphical techniques. The Toy Story animated movie
features the teapot model and DirectX even has its own teapot creation method;
D3DXCreateTeapot() ). It's often used when teaching OpenGL, but it is quite
restrictive and rarely used for serious projects.
ODE, Open Dynamics Engine, is a multiplatform physics engine that does col-
lision detection and rigid body simulation. It was used in the PC first-person
shooter game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Glfw, is the third portable OpenGL wrapper that
Tao provides access to. Glfw stands for OpenGL framework, and it looks to
expand on the functionality provided by GLUT. If you don't want to use SDL but
do want to use a framework to access OpenGL, this may be worth looking at.
DevIL, Developer's Image Library, is a library that loads textures from disk into
OpenGL. It's similar to OpenGL in that it's a state machine and it has similar
method names. It's cross-platform and supports a wide range of different image
formats (43!). Cg is one of the shader languages mentioned earlier in the chapter.
Using Tao.Cg, shader programs can be loaded from a text file or string, pro-
cessed, and used in OpenGL.