On Mar 17, 2004, at 9:05 AM, Keith Lea wrote:
Chet Haase wrote:The current plan is for the OpenGL pipeline to be disabled by default, but enabled via a command-line flag.Does this mean that applets and programs run by double-clicking a jar file won't be able to use the OpenGL pipeline, unless the user knows the command line switch (in the case of jars)?
Yes, that is the case for this release. The command line switch is more for developers (and advanced end users), so they can test their apps with this new pipeline. Ideally, Java 2D would automagically determine whether the OGL drivers on the system were reliable enough to enable the pipeline (we already do this to some extent with the DX pipeline). The user (or the developer deploying an app) should not have to know about this flag...
This seems like a crazy idea, considering the amount of effort going into the OpenGL pipeline. I imagine that disabling it by default will make it so that for 99% of people, the OpenGL pipeline won't be used. Most users don't want to open the command line to run a program and they don't want to have to remember -Ds.d.sdf.asd.OpenGL=true every time they run a program, and most users don't know how to modify the file association for .jar to pass in that property.
As Chet has mentioned, there are many valid reasons for not enabling this thing by default. The fact is, those 99% that you mention probably have old (or non-conformant, or buggy) OGL drivers installed on their machines, if at all. We're working with driver makers to get these issues resolved, so that we can enable this pipeline whereever possible in an upcoming release. Stay tuned.
This decision makes me mad at Sun. It seems they always start something good and then mess it up, like making an OpenGL pipeline then making it so no one will use it and it's hard to enable.
Whenever we schedule meetings, we always allot the first 20 minutes to discussing a great idea, and then we spend the other 40 minutes devising evil schemes. We always end meetings with a hearty round of diabolical laughter.
Will there be a way to programmatically enable the GL pipeline or is it only a system property at startup that can do it?
You can programmatically set the system property (via System.setProperty) in your app at startup. But I highly discourage you from doing so, for the same reasons that we haven't enabled the OGL pipeline in the first place.
If you follow this approach, and then deploy your app to many different hardware configurations, it's likely that we'll try to enable the OGL pipeline, and then the app will crash, or there will be rendering artifacts, all due to driver bugs. If you're working in a controlled environment, you might be able to take that risk, but most developers can't afford to offer that sort of end-user experience.
Thanks, Chris
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