Hi,
I found some history of OpenGL Longs Peak on wikipedia:
In the time this was going on I didn’t really understood what it was all about. Now I’m understanding it a little bit better.
Do you think the object model is/was a good idea?
Opengl has many limitations and problems (as well as dx has) due to used concept. Some are over 20years old, where completly different factors were the bottlenecks in computers.
If youa re interested in stuff like this, I suggest to take a look at the design idea behind mantle.
In practice it’s not that relevant so far, as this is what we have, for good and for worse. (I still cannot see dx as a real api, due to the limitation to windows os)
Looking back, I don’t think it’s as significant as people made it seem back then. Sure, they did not live up to their promises, but at least now they match features with DirectX, which was the main complaint.
Also, if they broke compatibility with OpenGL2 like they promised, it would have been much harder for jME3 to take advantage of OpenGL3/4 features while also supporting OpenGL2. We would have been forced to have two renderers that do the same thing in different ways (state based vs. OOP based).