what is libgu/libgum? Shoudl I use pspgl?

snowsquirrel · Post by **snowsquirrel** » Sat Apr 05, 2008 1:39 pm

I have been doing a few tutorials, and have a small project on the go. The tutorials I have been doing used gu/gum.

But I notice that it seems more people here are using pspgl. I have never really used opengl, so syntactically, I have no preference.

I am still early in my (learning) project, so I would like to switch to pspgl now if it is recommended. I know this topic is brough up periodically (i did a search), but not recently, and I do have a couple new questions.

Questions:
1. libGu, and libGum, look remarkably similar to Sony's official libraries. Are they safe (legally) to use?

2. Is there any performance or stability difference between the two? Is one more quirky than the other? (By quirky I mean ratio of exceptions vs. rules)

3. Which one is more actively updated?

4. does pspgl use libgu underneath, or vice versa?

5. do either support quads, or variable density fog?

6. why do gu/gum ship with the toolchain, and not pspgl?

Any other info to help my decision would be great.
~S

danzel · Post by **danzel** » Sat Apr 05, 2008 2:25 pm

1) Yes, gu/gum is legally safe as is the rest of the SDK, It was reverse engineered from some retail game (I think the headers mention which?)

2) You can get better performance with gu/gum than pspgl. Many programs will find pspgl fine however.

3) pspgl I'd say... but not in a way that means much. gu/gum is feature complete, while pspgl still lacks certain features that get added.

4) Nope, both use the ge (hardware) directly.

5) They both support quads afaik. There was recently a thread on fog in pspgl, I think the result was it needs some more work. Not sure on gu/gum, someone else can answer this better.

6) gu/gum are considered part of the toolchain because they are the 'native' graphics library, whereas pspgl was created to provide an opengl interface to the ge (hardware).

jean · Post by **jean** » Sat Apr 05, 2008 5:46 pm

I used to code openGl on win32 platform, but now i prefer GU/GUM. Except for function names, these libraries are organized in a very similar way, and with my openGL experience, i feel confortable with both. I would suggest pspGl ONLY to speedup porting code from other platforms to PSP.

snowsquirrel · Post by **snowsquirrel** » Sun Apr 06, 2008 12:09 am

Thanks, those two posts largely settled my decision.
~S

pspZorba · Post by **pspZorba** » Thu May 01, 2008 5:07 am

Hi

I re-open this post since I have the same dilemma and would like to know what was your decision (Gu/Gum ?) and after more than 3 weeks what are your feedbacks ?

snowsquirrel · Post by **snowsquirrel** » Thu May 01, 2008 5:21 am

I am making it multi-platform and using OpenGL for the PC side. I use a 480x272 viewport on the PC version too. The PC version is strictly for Debugging purposes.

I still haven't decided if I will port the PSP specific parts to OpenGL too. I must say that I do find the ge/gum a little nicer to use( i.e, no texture binding, draw arrays works nicer, but I would have alot more shared code if I used OpenGL. I will have to make a final decision on this when I finished getting the PC version off the ground.

It would probably be better for me to use OpenGL on both, then port the PSP stuff to Ge/Gum if I need it for performance reasons.

Hope that helps your decision.

~S

pspZorba · Post by **pspZorba** » Thu May 01, 2008 11:32 am

As I don't intend to be multi-plateform and won't debug on PC, I think I will stay with Gu/Gum for efficiency.

Anyway I will try to do my class design to encapsuate the specific code as much as possible

Thx for your feedbacks