Several years ago I was involved in a project that used HOOPs. The company didn t want to pay royalties any more and wasn t very convinced that HOOPs was the right product for them so I ported all the HOOPs functionality they used over to OpenGL. I have summarised my experience of this below but you will have to determine what is relevant for your projects.
Disadvantages/costs for that project:
- Needed to write object picking (HOOPs supplied that)
- Needed to write virtual trackball (HOOPs supplied that) [although sample code to do this is freely available]
- Had to move some data storage from HOOPs over to our own data structures
Advantages for that project:
- Able to use features of OpenGL such as transparency (although surely HOOPs has that by now?)
- Lots of resources to find help with OpenGL
- Better performance (for our case - I don t know if this is still true as it seems HOOPs uses OpenGL/DirectX underneath now)
- Better support for consumer-priced graphics cards & laptops
- More flexibility to go beyond what HOOPs thinks you should need to do
The big wins were the resources to find help and greater flexibility.