ncurses or opengl

I had a friend at school use Qbasic to model functions for intermolecular forces. it involved calculating particle position acceleration, and even, after the movement was paused, the field lines between the particles. It ran using an interpreter and was terribly *blinky* and slow.

I wanted to develop similar physics modeling application using C (something to compile, and to bone up before my next course). Using linux, would I be better suited to use the ncurses library or opengl.

Thanks ahead of time for the responses. :)


* by the way, mesa gl i know is the equivalent of opengl on linux,
are all the functions/prototypes the same?. ie. if i were to invest in
opengl material would i have to re-learn all the function names, etc. ?

OpenGL is cross platform so the functions are the same.

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Mesa is a 3-D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL.* To the extent that Mesa utilizes the OpenGL command syntax or state machine, it is being used with authorization from Silicon Graphics, Inc.(SGI). However, the author does not possess an OpenGL license from SGI, and makes no claim that Mesa is in any way a compatible replacement for OpenGL or associated with SGI.

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Mesa is an open source implementation of OpenGL. So you can use either of them on Linux

Hi there,

I'm sorry this has nothing to do with your post, but I'm writing software to do quantum chemical calculations (which of course involves the calculation of interparticle energies as part of it) - and i'm just really interested in hearing more about what you're doing.

I'd also be keen to learn about openGL because I know very little about it. All the graphical stuff i have used is ncurses, perl/TK, and java Swing/awt.

but games are written using openGL aren't they?? (I mean proper 3d games?)

anyway hope to hear from you - feel free to PM me if you're interested in chatting about molecular stuff.

James

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Originally Posted by CuLtOfGoAt

It ran using an interpreter and was terribly *blinky* and slow.

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There is a QBasic compiler called QuickBasic. I'm not sure if it is still available though.

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Originally Posted by CuLtOfGoAt

* by the way, mesa gl i know is the equivalent of opengl on linux,
are all the functions/prototypes the same?. ie. if i were to invest in
opengl material would i have to re-learn all the function names, etc. ?

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Mesa is just a free OpenGL implementation. Theoretically it doesn't matter which OpenGL implementation you use to develop your code, it should run on all of them (and there are tons of. Practically every graphics card vendor has its own implementation, specifically optimized for its card).

That said, I'd go for OpenGL along with GLut. GLut is pretty nice to get around all the OS specific stuff like initialization, context setup... Usually it's just a few commands to get a working OpenGL window opened with it.
Another reason for OpenGL is that you're dealing with 3D objects (at least I guess you do) and you won't have to worry about how to represent those properly on a 2D screen.

appreciation to all, off to the gl brick road i go