
OpenSG Contributed Packages
===========================

This area of the source tree contains packages that have been contributed by
users. They are not part of the official distributions, and they are not
supported by the core team. That might change over time, depending on
development, demand and licensing constraints as given by the authors(s). They
can have licenses that differ significantly from the LGPL license used for
OpenSG itself.

That's why nothing is enabled by default. To use anything from this directory
you first need to rename the file common.libs.in.disabled in this directory to
common.libs.in. After that you need to do the same rename in the directories
of the parts you want to include in your OSGContrib library. Again: note that
every contribution has its own usage license, it's your responsibility to
adhere to that license!

Every directory has a README file that lists contact information for the
author(s) and some general information about the contribution. The primary
thing to watch out for are additional libraries needed by the contributions.
These have to be added manually to the configure call in the --with-add-lib=,
and possibly using the --with-add-incdir= and --with-add-libdir= options for
libraries that are not in the standard pathes. Example: the VideoGrab contrib
needs the avcodoc and avformat libs, and the ffmpeg/avformat.h header. You
need to call configure with "--with-add-incdir=<path where ffmpeg is> 
--with-add-libdir=<path where libavformat.so and libavcodec.so are>
--with-add-lib=avformat:avcodec"

The currently available contributions are

- CGChunk:                  Chunk for nVidia's CG library
- DrawFunctorCore:          Callback-based OpenGL NodeCore
- LinearCombinerGeometry:   Geometric morphing between objects
- MayaExporter:             Plugin for Maya to export OpenSG geometry, plus 
                              helper classes for some deformation support
- InventorLoader:           Use the Inventor library to load .iv files
- VideoGrab:                Grab an applications graphics to a video file
- WindowFOX:                Support for the FOX window toolkit


If you want to contribute: great! Take a look at the existing contributions
and structure your contribution similar to them. Your FieldContainer should be
part of the Contrib library, the code should adhere to the OpenSG code style
(see 
http://opensg.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Main/DocumentationTopics).
What we definitely need are some examples, preferrably in the style of the
Tutorials. While none of this code is actively maintained by the core team, we
at least want to see that it works and what it does. ;)


The OpenSG Core
2003/11/04
