hej all

i want to announce the offical release of 'gestalt'.





at its core 'gestalt' is a library for drawing with opengl. in contrast to the already existing processing drawing concepts 'gestalt' focuses on more advanced drawing techniques and features like shadows, vertexbufferobjects, framebufferobjects and glsl. it supplies constructs to make these features more accessible.

'gestalt' is very much about opengl. understanding opengl, helps understand 'gestalt' and vice versa.

some of the more striking things you can do with 'gestalt' and processing is throwing your sketch on a 3D model as a texture, applying blur to your sketch in real time or rendering some 10000 particles at a decent framerate.

we always tried to keep up the processing spirit and make everything easy to use in the first place but still maintaining full access to more complex operations. also we have written millions of demos to illustrate opengl or 'gestalt' features.

the main difference in the way things are handled in 'basic' processing compared to 'gestalt' is the 'persistent object concept'. objects are instantiated, added to 'gestalt' and then drawn until they are removed again.

'gestalt' didn t start as a processing library, that s why it can also be used as a standalone renderer without processing. in the beginning we borrowed a lot of concepts from processing and only later realized ( as we and processing advanced ) that we and others will always love processing quite a lot. so we wrote the processing 'plugin'.

if you are interested check out the website, go to sourceforge, or check out the latest version from the svn.