GLScene the OpenGL solution for Delphi This page has been accessed times since 13. April 2000

Maintained by Eric Grange - This library is based on Mike Lischke's GLScene.

Download the latest version (v0.7.1) including OpenGL12 interface unit, Geometry and 3DS import library.

GLScene is an OpenGL based 3D library for Delphi. It provides visual components and objects allowing description and rendering of 3D scenes in an easy, no-hassle, yet powerfull manner.

GLScene is not just an OpenGL wrapper or utility library, it has grown to become a set of founding classes for a generic 3D engine with Rapid Application Development in mind. GLScene allows you to quickly design and render 3D scenes without having to learn the intricacies of OpenGL, if you know how to design a TForm, you'll easily master the basic operations of TGLScene. The library comes with a set of demos showcasing the ease of use, and demonstrating RAD wasn't done at the expense of CPU horsepower.

GLScene is released to the public as open-source under Mozilla Public Licence.

'nuff with the commercials, let's get down to the features :

GLScene Changes from v0.7 to v0.7.1 : (fixes release)

• Fixed nasty IDE bug : added objects would be neither declared in source, nor properly recognised by Delphi's IDE until open/close.
• Added TGLProxyObject : allows better & easier sharing of ressources, adjusts its MasterObject property and you've got a clone (no samples yet, quite untested)
• Added support for categories of objects (objects are now sorted in different submenus)
• TAsyncTimer in v0.7 was still using the old code, this is now fixed
• Various fixes and enhancements, see file headers for details (thanks Roger Cao, Mike Lischke, Nelson Chu, Carlos A. Rivero, Gary Clark, James Burroughs...)

A mailing list / message board for GLScene is now available, you can subscribe here.
Work in progress, unofficial announcements, minor updates will be posted there.
Feel free to use it for any kind of support requests/offers.

Other changes : see What was new. What is coming : see Planned features.

• Scene description
  • hierarchical objects structure, with as many objects as memory allows
  • interactive scene management (numerous Delphi experts)
  • easy to use rotation and movement functions for each object
  • predefined objects (all standards from cube to teapot to sprite), easily extendable
  • structural object (dummy cube) for manageing composite objects
  • camera and light objects that can be used anywhere in a scene objects hierarchy
  • behaviour objects can be attached to objects for animation purposes, easily extendable
  • per-object special effects (before/after object rendering and scene after-effects), easily extendable
  • support for particle systems, any object or object structure can be a particle
  • 3D Studio file import with automatic and precise normal vector calculation (using the given smoothing groups of the file) and texture coordinate import
  • MD2 file import with texture coordinates

• Materials
  • easy to use, optimized, material object
  • material library to share or reuse materials
  • ambient, diffuse, emission, specular and shininess support
  • support of blending modes (transparency, additive...)
  • alpha-channel auto-generation
  • polymorphic image support for texturing (allows many formats as well as procedural textures), easily extendable
  • more than 150 predefined colors like clrCornflowerBlue or clrCoolCopper, easily extendable

• Rendering
  • automatically uses the hardware OpenGL driver if available
  • a well working camera model using focal length and targeting
  • multiple viewers for one or more scenes, easy change of view through camera selection
  • fog and depth-of-view support
  • render to a file, a bitmap or to the printer in any color and pixel resolution
  • full screen support with dynamic resolution changes

• Animation
  • propagation of time progression events
  • easily extendable Behaviours
  • dynamic physics : inertia, acceleration, damping and force application
  • automatic, realtime scene cadenceing

• Interface
  • easy-to-use function to determine picked objects
  • helper functions for camera movements
  • helper functions for picked object's translation

• Utilities
  • optimized geometry functions and utilities (vector, quaternion and matrix...)
  • component to make full-featured screen-saver in a few clicks
  • precise frame speed determination
  • asynchronous timer (multi-threaded)
  • joystick support

Notes :

* Delphi 5 basicly supports BMP, WMF, EMF, ICO and JPG, you can add support for GIF, TIF, TGA, PSD and many more by including the GraphicEx library from Mike Lischke.

Next updates will focus on all structural aspects of GLScene, with v1.0 having all base classes and structures defined and working (but few variations). Don't ask for release dates or schedules, there are none, and if there was one, RealLife (tm) would probably tear it apart ;).

• Never ending quest for EXE-size and memory use reductions, faster geometry, faster OpenGL calls, more demos...
• Enhanced, structured mesh objects (pre-requisite for many things listed below)
• Multi-texturing, texture movements, deformations and animations
• Set of built-in procedural textures (camera, plasma, fire, sky, marble, wood...)
• Composite objects with automatic Delphi IDE expert support (ala Poser4 morphs)
• Support for more vector file formats as well as 3DS texture mapping (only coordinates are imported now)
• Support for reflections and mirror effects
• Light maps, shadow maps
• Support for revolution objects (described by a curve and an axis)
• Terrain and height-fields objects (outdoor support), progressive fractal terrain refinement
• Buildings/Maze/City objects (indoor support)
• Sample after-effects (lens-flares, rain, snow...)
• Collision detection (fast ellipsoid, precise polygon-level detection and ray-casting)
• More physics (gravity, tension, bouncing, force-fields...)
• Skeletal animation, skinning, poseing
• Better support for Frame-based actor animation (ala Quake/Quake II)
• Bezier and Nurbs (curves and surfaces)
• Trajectory following, terrain flyover, "drop on floor"
• Volumetric fog
• Shadow casting using stencil buffer, volumetric shadows
• "Automatic" tesselation
• Environmental audio (3D) sound support (maybe through OpenAL if it reaches stability, or OpenML if it actually shows up)
• ....and many more (that may be implemented sooner than those :)

• When using behaviours, you must manually add GLBehaviours to your "uses" clause (there may be a way to notify Delphi's IDE that a particular unit is used, but I do not know it...).
• GLScene crashes when a TGLSceneViewer is visible and resolution is changed with "QuickRes" or the Windows Display pannel.
• OpenGL library won't be unbinded after ending an application from Delphi's debugger, causing some memory loss under Win9x (no pb with NT).
• GLScene.WindowOptions ignores some of the options (I have not really tested this code yet).
• Moving a camera's target, or a camera's parent will not automatically update the TGLSceneViewer, maybe not really a bug since all the ways I found around this would gobble up zillions of cpu-cycles in complex scenes...
• Won't run on SGI's Windows software implementation ("opengl.dll").

• Micorsoft's NT4 software OpenGL won't honour some resize requests, clinging to a 640x480 resolution
• 3Dfx ICD has at least one hard-coded break point (don't worry if Delphi's debugger sometimes stops in the middle of nowhere, just continue running the code, it won't happen with a standalone EXE)
• 3Dfx ICD has a tendency to accumulate access-violations (and not intercept them fast enough, don't worry if Delphi's debugger sometimes stops with a "too much unhandled access violations" message, just continue running the code, it won't happen with a standalone EXE)

GLScene Changes from v0.6 to v0.7 :

• Added support for Behaviours (TGLBehaviours/TGLBehaviour) in TGLBaseSceneObject, with accompanying IDE expert. Behaviours are a stepping stone for more goodies to come (particle systems, flyby, drop-on-floor, force-fields...).
• Added TGLParticles, the Particle System component, with accompanying samples (in sprites/particles and bench/whirlwind). Features visual-design, unlimited particle count, automatic particle pool management, parenting support (a particle can be a single object or a structure that may contain any objects (including particle systems)) and more.
• Added the first behaviour, "Simple Inertia" (handles translation/rotation speed, acceleration and damping) with its "torque" demo.
• New utility component : TGLCadencer, a step toward point-and-click only animation with GLScene (see screen-saver sample: things move without a single animation-related line of code in the saver's main form).
• New utility component : TScreenSaver (make screen-savers in a snap!), comes with a full-featured sample screen-saver with preview and GLScene-based config dialog (the component can be used without using GLScene).
• New classes : TXCollection/TXCollectionItem (can be used without GLScene) with IDE expert, similar to VCL's TCollection but with polymorphism support (allows items of varied classes, base class for TGLBehaviours/TGLBehaviour and other goodies to come).
• Fixed TJoystick component, it should now behave properly (at least for a 2 axis, 4 buttons stick). Added a Joystick demo.
• Added support for effects (per object, pre- or post- object rendering, scene after-effects), these are subclasses of TGLBehaviour with added rendering abilities. No samples, untested.
• TAsyncTimer is now based on the ThreadTimer code (by Carlos Barbosa) as suggested by Roger Cao.
• Various minor additions and fixes, see file headers for details (thanks Uwe Raabe for quadrics and memory fixes and Jens Treichler for spotlights vector recalculation)

GLScene Changes from v0.5.0 to v0.6 : (in no particular order)

Note for users of previous versions : the version released here has been altered quite heavily, most classes and components are still here, but most have been renamed or rearranged and this package is not an incremental improvement (neither is it a complete rewrite) : projects designed with previous versions won't compile with this one, and you'll probably have to manually modify DFMs to make them work. However, this version is more stable, faster, uses less memory and has more to offer. And since previous versions won't be supported, it is highly recommended to migrate your applications. Incremental compatibility will be provided from this point on.

• Requires Delphi 5 (may compile under D4, but experts make use of D5's TFrame)
• Fixed (all ?) crashes (most came from bugs in experts and OpenGL12.pas, other buggy objects have been deactivated)
• Added a bunch of demos (heavily commented, tutorial-style)
• Added new experts (color editor, material editor, material preview, vector editor, material library picker)
• Added and optimized many Geometry function (mainly through better parameters support)
• Changed GLScene main objects names so they begin with "TGL"
• Significantly reduced dependencies, EXE size is now vastly reduced for a bare-bones GLScene application
• Massive optimization of what is stored in the DFMs (smaller EXEs)
• Fixed texturing (PersistentImage), added full-polymorphic texture image data support
• Vector file objects, Joystick support have been moved to separate units
• Added "Target" to TGLCamera so you can point your camera to a particular object, also added utility functions for moving a camera around its target
• New objects : TDummyCube (for use as camera target or composite object handler), TSprite (a "plane" that is always facing the camera, for use in particle systems, special effects or doom-like 2D monsters :)
• Added AbsolutePosition calculation functions, and depth-sorting for blended objects rendering
• TSpaceText now allows for low-quality 3D text (reduced poly count)
• Added ability to save/load scene or material library to a file
• Added Progress event chain
• ...and many more (see headers in pascal files for more details)