Introduction

The "Graphics Abstraction Layer & Engine" (GALE) is an object oriented wrapper around OpenGL and its extensions. It is designed to be modern, lightweight and self-consistent (there is no CRT dependency). Typical targets are small graphical applications. You can probably think of it as something similar to (but far less extensive than) the great Wild Magic and G3D Innovation Engine libraries, with a bit of GLEW and GLM, however with a focus on very compact programs.

The current version of the C++ library is GALE 2, a complete rewrite of the abandoned GALE 1 which was previously hosted in SVN at SourceForge. GALE 2 has all new OpenGL wrappers and vertex-vertex mesh classes with subdivision support. It makes heavy use of (meta-)templates for more generic code, better performance, as well as smaller code size, and also comes with minimal CRT replacement routines. Not all of the GALE 1 functionality is available in GALE 2 yet (e.g. images and billboards), but on the other hand GALE 2 already provides a lot of functionality not available in GALE 1, like Frame Buffer Object wrappers and interpolator classes.

For building GALE 2, please refer to the prerequisites.

There also is a sub-project called GLEX, an OpenGL Extension Specification Parser, which is used to turn OpenGL extension specification files into a set of compact C source files that can be easily included into existing projects to initialize only the desired extension or core API function pointers. GLEX version 2 parses the database *.spec / *.tm files which are linked from the OpenGL Registry. As GLEX is written in PHP, it can be easily used from both the command line and via a web front-end.

Please try out GLEX 2 online.