Oh that sounds really interesting. I was searching for something like that to render something on a fun-hacky-ledscreen with an embedded processor. All things I found weren&#x27;t satisfying.
But if I understand that correctly, I should be able to just compile this and then software render stuff? For my tiny 192x128 pixels this should be fast enough on any kinda system. Time for fun animations

The mantra for the library is &quot;raylib is a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy videogames programming.&quot; It&#x27;s for hobbyist, learners, tinkerers, or just those that want to enjoy minimalistic graphics programming without having to deal with interfacing with modern machines yourself.The default Windows installer bundles the compiler and a text editor to make poking at C to get graphics on the screen (accelerated or not) a 1 step process. Raylib is also extremely cross platform, has bindings in about every language, and has extra (also header only, 0 dependency) optional libraries for many adjacent things like audio or text rendering.When I first started to learn C&#x2F;C++ in the 2000s I spent more time fighting the IDE&#x2F;Windows&#x2F;GCC or getting SDL&#x2F;SFML to compile than I did actually playing with code - and then it all fell apart when I tried to get it working on both Linux and Windows so I said fuck it and ignored that kind of programming for many years. Raylib is about going the opposite direction - start poking at C code (or whatever binding) and having it break and worry about the environment later when you&#x27;re ready for something else.

This site is for hackers, which basically means people who like to do things like this. If you can&#x27;t understand why someone would be interested in this, probably you should remain silent and try to understand hackers rather than commenting.

As someone who was once a child trying to figure out how to compile and link things to use SDL, I think there&#x27;s some educational value in letting people make games without having to dive deep into how to use C++ toolchains.

As someone working on a game engine with a multithreaded SSE&#x2F;NEON implementation of ~GL 1.3 under the hood, this is rad for many reasons other than portability or compatibility. You get full access to every pixel and vertex on the screen at any point in the rendering pipeline. This allows for any number of cool (also likely multithreaded) postprocessing effects that you don&#x27;t have to shoehorn through a brittle, possibly single-platform shading language and API.

Because GPU APIs are a nightmare clustertruck.

I mean this with all the appropriate venom we can muster: this attitude is why software quality is nonexistent.

Why not? The original Doom didn&#x27;t use a GPU renderer. It should be possible to do simple 3d stuff in today&#x27;s computers without it.

Win32 has already a pretty good opengl 1.2 software renderer.

Raylib&#x27;s author was very happy to announce that you can compile an entire raylib program with no dependencies other than, say, being a win32 app <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;raysan5&#x2F;status&#x2F;1980322289527976202" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;raysan5&#x2F;status&#x2F;1980322289527976202</a>

Amazing:(Mar 5 2022) TinyGL 0.4.1 is out (Changelog)(Mar 17 2002) TinyGL 0.4 is out (Changelog)&quot;our plans are measured in centuries&quot;

What an aspirational figure, that guy does it all!

I saw a few of these things in the 90s and they definetly were not cool. They were slow, clunky or produced artifacts. You needed close integration between the game and renderer for perf.Funny how history turns out.

See also the fork by C-Chads:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;C-Chads&#x2F;tinygl" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;C-Chads&#x2F;tinygl</a>It seems to have more features and limited support for multithreading, with more recent updates compared to the original project. Sadly it was archived in late 2023.

Fabrice Bellard also wrote an OpenGL thing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org&#x2F;TinyGL&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bellard.org&#x2F;TinyGL&#x2F;</a>

he gonna drop it, since it&#x27;s a main stream thing now and it did hit hn :D.

Curious to hear the take Tsoding has on that news.

If you keep resolution low, manage your scene complexity carefully and commit to the art style, you can make reasonable 3D games that run even on 20 year old hardware. I did so as an experiment on my game [1] [2] and now that I can see that it works, I am working on a second, more &quot;serious&quot; and complete one. Computers are fast.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45270981">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45270981</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;totenarctanz.itch.io&#x2F;a-scavenging-trip" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;totenarctanz.itch.io&#x2F;a-scavenging-trip</a>Really cool news about raylib. I will seriously consider using this.

Oh, man! This is really cool. Do you maintain a blog or a patreon that allows people to follow the progress on the project?Any way I can buy you a beer?

&gt; I have to use the ancient OpenGL fixed function pipelineWhy do you have to and do you also use parts of the old immediate-mode API?

Sidenote: Can&#x27;t wait for the release!

Edit: I missed this was software rendered. I’m one gen-iteration ahead. Prob would still be possible to render my game cpu side provided I use the most efficient sprite depth ordering algorithm possible (my game is isometric pixel art like rollercoaster tycoon)Ha! That’s what I’m stuck with for Metropolis 1998. I have to use the ancient OpenGL fixed function pipeline (thankfully I discovered an AB extension function in the gl.h file that allows addition fields to be passed to the GPU).I’m using SFML for the graphics framework which I think is OpenGL 1.xGame to show what’s possible: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;2287430&#x2F;Metropolis_1998&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.steampowered.com&#x2F;app&#x2F;2287430&#x2F;Metropolis_1998&#x2F;</a>

Software rendering is the future anyway, with the caveat that it is actually hardware accelerated, by making use of compute (GPGPU).

Imagine what it could do with modern SIMD and many cores. Won&#x27;t come close to dGPU, but still...

We had software rendered unreal tournament decades ago. Full 3d. It runs like a champ in 2023:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;MGZQAH5J1OQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;MGZQAH5J1OQ</a>

What&#x27;s cool about this is that computers are so fast that you could probably make a decent 2D game using only this software-rendered OpenGL 1.1 library.

An order of magnitude more ;) You need to implement user-programmable shaders, both ARB assembly and GLSL. That needs a GLSL parser, a shader interpreter (talking about compiling it to machine code would add another magnitude of complexity).You also need to implement multitexturing (probably the easy part) but also all the texture combiner stuff too. This one is not hard but also a good chunk of code...All in all, at least 40K if you ask me, but that&#x27;s a very lowball estimate.Of course if you don&#x27;t care about implementing the full spec, you can get away with a lot less.

I implemented the OpenGL API for fixed function hardware once, and chose the cut off at 1.5 with some extensions like framebuffer objects. 1.x has a lot of cruft that nobody should use, but is still easy to implement. 2.x has a lot of stuff like shaders that are a lot more work to implement in software.

Not sure what the line count is, but PortableGL is a software renderer for 3.x(ish):<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rswinkle&#x2F;PortableGL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;rswinkle&#x2F;PortableGL</a>Cool project, and fun to play with.

&gt; OpenGL 1.1-style implementation on softwareHow many lines to implement OpenGL 2.0 (non ES) ?

i&#x27;m so happy i could understand most of the code. props to pikuma.com for showing us the beauty of software renderers!

Interesting. Does this mean it could be used for creating games for NES, SNES, Genesis, etc?

This will be perfect for Nintendo 3DS!

That&#x27;s an extremely snarky reply given the post is just a direct link to the header.

Congrats for only reading the header ;) It&#x27;s actually a pretty decent OpenGL 1.1 software implementation, obviously not complete and spec-correct though. It&#x27;s more like those MiniGL drivers back in the day, implementing just enough of the spec so the game can run ;)In a similar way, this implements just enough so Raylib&#x27;s OpenGL backend can run! It was done so you can use the library without external graphics dependencies if you really want to.

It would be kind of neat to have OpenGL running on AVX-512, just for fun…

No, this is CPU rendering only! Not even SIMD, just straightforward integer (and float) code.

rlsw – Raylib software OpenGL renderer in less than 5k LOC