Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Qt / Angle / OpenGL

[Mark Brand]

On 01/22/2015 04:05 AM, SEAiq wrote:

We do use the normal OpenGL interface and when it works it works great.  However, our app (a marine navigation app used by pilots to navigate large seagoing vessels) makes use of OpenGL shaders so it will not work with the Microsoft OpenGL 1.1 fall-back library.  Expecting users to have up to date OpenGL libraries is (very) problematic.

I believe it is exactly for this reason that Google and Firefox invested the effort in developing ANGLE… its avoids the hassles with OpenGL libraries not working or being out of date.  I believe it is also for this reason that QT has embedded ANGLE in their distribution.

Does anyone have any experience with using ANGLE as part of or in conjunction with MXE?

best, Mark

I have not tried it yet but it would be nice to get angle support building successfully with MXE. You mentioned that you started out by running qmake in the src/angle directory, but I suggest the following approach:

Start by changing qtbase.mk so that the angle option instead of —opengl desktop is passed to the configure script. If this doesn't work, I would start by suspecting that qtbase's configure script doesn't handle this properly for cross-compiling for MXE. Keep in mind that the use of the configure script for cross-compiling for mingw is not officially supported by the Qt project. The fact that it works as well as it does is due to patches from us, the MXE project. Qt officially uses configure.exe both for msvc and mingw. You could examine configure.exe's source code (in the qtbase tree) to see what it does for angle, and try to fix the configure script so it does the same.

Mark