Appendix C - More Documentation and Tools

Chapter Overview

---

>Doxygen Documentation Pages >OpenSG Mailinglist >OpenSG Test Files >Despairing >OpenSG Scene Viewer

---

Doxygen Documentation Pages

Although, I really tried hard and spent a lot of time, this documentation cannot cover every question that might appear... ;-) So, there still will be some unanswered questions after all, most of them, I hope, are class specific questions like: "what methods are available" for example. In that case the doxgen documentation from OpenSG may help you.

For version 1.2 you can find that documentation online: http://www.opensg.org/doc-1.2.0/index.html. If you want the documentation for the cvs version you have to build it yourself by typing

    cd /path/to/your/OpenSG_Folder
    make userdoc userstarter // Create HTML and PDF versions

Building the doc pages will take about an hour on an average PC.

Regardless of which version you use, information about all classes can be found easily when clicking on "Alphabetical List". You know see, well, an alphabetical list, of all classes found in OpenSG. Click on any and you have some information of that specific class: All member variables and methods are revealed as well as the inheritance diagramm. The following image shows the detailed page of the Transform class

Class reference page

In this case, you can see that Transform is derived from FieldContainer. As I mentioned before, please keep in mind, that most of the important methods and member variables are not stored in the classes themselves, but in their corresponding base classes. If you have a look at the methods of osg::Transform, you will notice that there is not much interesting to see. However, the most important method for this class is setMatrix() which can be found in osg::TransformBase. You can simply click on that class in the inheritance diagram.

The bad news is, that this doxygen documentation is not quite complete. A detailed description for every (or at least most) methods or classes in general is missing. So if you want to implement something, and you have no clue how a class you need could be named or even exists at all, the doxygen pages won't help you.

OpenSG Mailinglist

However, you need not to desperate, because there is always a last chance where you can get help. The OpenSG mailinglist can be found at sourceforge.net : http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=5283 where you can subscribe to the userlist, which is the most interesting one. You can read all mails in the archieve without subscribing, but you need to, if you want to send mails yourself. When subscribing, you can also let sourceforge send you a mail in a digest every two or three days, where all new messages are bundled in a single mail.

The developers themselves, among other experienced users, are very active in replying to questions - so if there is nobody who can help you... then no one will ;-)

OpenSG Test Files

There are quite a lot test .cpp files, which are used by the developers to test basic OpenSG functionality. These test files are stored together with the rest of the source code. So you can simply search for all files named 'test*.cpp'. Maybe one of the 150+ files shows you something you need an I forget to tell you. However, this should be one of your last options in order to solve a problem... ;-)

Despairing

Well, if everything fails... read the source code. You should only do that if you are an excellent programmer and have a considerable amount of time... OpenSG is quite powerful and uses some pretty sophisticated C++ code, that can be quite intimidating at first. Don't worry, it's actually quite logical once you see the logic.

OpenSG Scene Viewer

Actually the OpenSG Scene Viewer is not related to documentation in any way, but it is a useful tool from time to time. The scene viewer enables you to load any scene file, that OpenSG is able to read and besides of rendering the model, there is also a tree view of the graph structure. Especially for exported files from modeling packages this comes in very useful. The following image shows the running appication with the Beethoven model loaded

The OpenSG Scene Viewer in action

As you can see, there are also some statistics displayed in the rendering window, thus you can test how well a model is being rended by OpenSG or if it loads correctly at all...

The OpenSG Scene Viewer is not compiled by default, you have to do it yourself, if you have not downloaded a precompiled package. However if you have compiled OpenSG on you own, this one is peanuts.

    cd your_OpenSG_Folder/Examples/SceneViewer
    make

After a short time of compiling you can start the viewer by calling

    ./osgSceneViewer

in that folder. It may be useful to create a symbolic link or copy the binary to /usr/local/bin if you use it often, but that is up to you.

Windows users using a binary installer will have an entry in their start menu.

Well, I am sure you can use this application without further explanation ;-)

---