Having straightened out MyGL this weekend to behave far more transparently with the underlying OpenGL state machine (effectively created an object-oriented OpenGL 3.x filter) I now have to take on the challenge of actually writing easy-to-use code bases on top of it. The first issue that I'm going to tackle is two-dimensional rendering. I don't think OpenGL gives 2D enough love by default. You look at an API like DirectX and they've got a custom sprite rendering component that provides accelerated blitting operations right along side traditional 3D rendering techniques. Although it's closed-source I have to imagine that under hood this sprite rendering system is uses much the same hardware techniques as the rest of the API. There's no reason this can't be done with OpenGL, except that OpenGL chooses not to anything like it. My own opinion is that OpenGL is trying to be as low-level and "simple" as it can be, and as a result the idea of an additional layer of indirection from the hardware that a sprite-rendering system would provide doesn't quite feel right.
