What is Shade?

Shade is a Scene Graph built along the following guidelines.

• Completely Object-Oriented - Shade provides a clear Object hierarchy written in C++ with liberal use of the STL and Boost C++ libraries that is easily extendable
• No Fixed Functionality Rendering - Shade implements an Effect framework that relies on programmable shaders to render a scene
• Any Application is Distributed - Shade Applications just need to be compiled as a distributed application and they will work on a cluster of computers with no additional code

Shade is not a single library, but is a series of libraries with each building upon the former libraries.

Core Libraries

• ShadeMPI - Provides communication over the MPI
• ShadeOpenGL - Provides an Object-Oriented wrapping of OpenGL
• ShadeSceneGraph - Provides a framework for creating a Scene Graph
• ShadeApplication - Provides a cross platform application interface

Optional Libraries

• ShadeModels - Provides a framework for loading 3D Models (3DS and MD2 files supported)
• ShadeLuaGlue - Provides an interface to the Lua programming language Coming Soon

All the source code for this library is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License. All other libraries required to use this library are available under their respective licenses.

Current Release

As of August 2007, Shade is in an Alpha State of development, and no release package is available.

Developer snapshots are available through Subversion at SourceForge and can be accessed via the following command.

svn co https://shadegl.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/shadegl shadegl

Dependencies

Shade relies on a number of Open Source libraries for functionality. These libraries are required to compile and use Shade

• Boost (ver 1.34 for standalone applications, ver 1.35 for distributed applications)
• GLEW (ver 1.3 or later)
• DevIL (ver 1.6 or later)
• GLFW (ver 2.6 or later)
• An MPI 1.0 compliant implementation (for distributed applications)

Platforms Supported

Shade is built using cross platform libraries that work on a number of platforms. Shade has been tested and verified to compile and run on the following

• Windows 2000/XP (will most likely work under Vista but has not been tested)
• Linux (will most likely work on any Linux distro but has only been tested under SUSE)
• MacOS X

Hardware Supported

Shade requires a graphics card that is OpenGL 2.x compatible, and will not work properly on some older graphics cards.

• Nvidia GeForce FX series or later card with ForceWare Release 75 or later drivers
• ATI Radeon 9000 series or later with Catalyst 5.3 or later drivers