The Lightweight Visualization Toolkit (LVT)

News

2005-02-17: liblvt 0.4.1 Released

Version 0.4.1 includes the following changes:

• Removed the scalar typedef (use float instead)
• New texture repeat mode control functions added to the Texture class
• Some texture-releated bug fixes

2005-02-07: liblvt 0.4.0 Released

Version 0.4.0 includes the following changes:

• New classes: MD2Model, TexGen, TexEnv, StencilTest, Mesh
• Merged DepthMask class into the DepthTest class
• Added pre-defined Material types to the Material class
• Added new example program: A port of the classic glxgears demo
• Full OpenGL 2.0 support via GLEW 1.3
• Many bug fixes

Introduction

LVT is a library designed to simplify the creation of small graphics programs by handling common tasks such as creating a window, handling input, and loading textures from disk. The library is comprised of a windowing toolkit and a scene graph library. While designed to be familliar to users of other scengraph APIs, LVT is not meant to be as full-featured and powerful as other scenegraph APIs such as SGL or OpenInventor. Rather, the emphasis is on simplifying the development of smaller programs. LVT is built on top of the OpenGL graphics API and is portable, as are programs written with LVT. See the Getting Started Guide for more details on how to create graphics programs with the library.

LVT is released under the terms of the MIT License.

Features

• Cross-platform

  LVT is cross-platform, and runs on a variety of different operating systems (see the Supported Platforms section). In addtion, LVT abstracts the window system layer, so that programs written with LVT are themselves portable.

• Object-oriented

  LVT is implemented entirely in C++. Extending the library is as easy as subclassing any library class.

• Simplicity

  LVT is designed to be simple to use. LVT handles the grunt work of common graphics programming tasks like creating a window and initializing an OpenGL context.

• Easy extension access

  LVT contains the GL Extension Wrangler library to simplify the loading and use of OpenGL extensions. The loading of extension entry points is handled automatically by the library. See the GLEW homepage for more information about using GLEW.

• Support for common file formats

  LVT automates the loading of OpenGL textures from common graphics file formats. Currently, LVT understands .dds, .bmp, .tga, and .pcx files. More file formats are planned for future releases.

Supported Platforms

LVT currently supports

• UNIX and UNIX-Like environments
      Tested under Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (via Gtk+. A native Aqua port is planned.)

• Win32 platforms
      Tested under Windows XP and 2000

Download

The latest release of LVT is available on the sourceforge project area.

Which package should I download?

There are two packages: The full source package, and the Win32 binary package. For UNIX platforms, download the source package and install with ./configure; make; make install. For Win32 platforms, the Win32 binary package contains all the header files, dlls, and library files that you need to write programs with LVT.

Documentation

Getting Started Guide

Class reference (Generated with Doxygen)

Comments, questions, and bug reports are always welcome: F Alan Hickman