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PHP-GLFW: An OpenGL and GLFW Extension for PHP

A fully-featured OpenGL and GLFW extension for PHP. Batteries included 🔋!

PHPglfw

PHP-GLFW allows you to create 2D and 3D real-time applications in PHP. Bringing a whole different set of tools into the PHP world to develop graphical applications like games, scientific simulations, user interfaces, and more.

What is this extension? Features 🚀

PHP-GLFW aims to be one extension containing all basics you need to start building graphical applications in PHP. That means that PHP-GLFW does NOT only provide GLFW library bindings. Instead, it also includes OpenGL bindings and a bunch of classes and helpers pretty much required for building these types of applications.

OpenGL

  • Full native support of OpenGL (4.1+ core), GPU accelerated rendering in PHP.
  • Targeting OpenGL 4.1, but it can also be built for newer versions.
  • Support for OpenGL extensions (limited).
  • Mostly mirroring the C API, adjustments were made where required or otherwise nonsensical.
  • We currently support about ~90% of the full standard, check GLSUPPORT.md

GLFW

This extension comes obviously with bindings for the amazing GLFW library. GLFW comes with great features, to name a few:

  • Multiplatform window creation and handling (macOS, Windows, Linux)
  • Support for multiple windows and monitors
  • Real-time user input handling
  • Keyboard and Mouse event handling
  • Joystick input support

PHPGL - Math

PHPGL is what I call the extras in this extension, aka classes and helpers additionally provided that are pretty much a requirement for these kinds of applications. PHP-GLFW comes with a mathematics library written in C, covering the most common operations required for graphical applications.

  • Supported structs: Vec2, Vec3, Vec4, Mat4, and Quat
  • Includes most common matrix operations for the use case like: lookAt, perspective, inverse, rotate, etc.

Having this integrated into the extension comes with a bunch of advantages:

  • It's fast
  • Low memory footprint
  • The math structures have overloaded operators, so you can write things like: 
    use GL\Math\Vec2;
$v3 = Vec2(15, -5) + Vec2(42, 7); // returns Vec2(54, 2)

  • Some OpenGL functions can directly accept the math structs as arguments

  • Read more about math functions

PHPGL - Buffers

This extension also contains a collection of buffer objects that internally hold data in native types.

  • Can handle large arrays of data
  • Low memory footprint and very fast

  • Data is stored internally to be directly uploadable to the GPU

  • Read more about the buffers

PHPGL - Textures

PHP-GLFW supports the loading of images/textures into buffers without requiring an additional extension:

  • Can load common image formats such as jpg, png, tga, bmp, gif (gd or Imagick is not required)
  • Can write images/textures back to disk

  • Writes data into a BufferInterface object, giving full access to the bitmap from userland

  • Read more about texture loading

PHPGL - Geometry

PHP-GLFW also comes with a .obj Wavefront file loader. This allows you to load and parse .obj files. We also provide a few helpers to generate tangent and bitangent vectors for the loaded geometry directly. Currently, we only support triangulated geometry and no quads.

  • Can parse .obj and .mtl files
  • Can generate the normal, tangent, and bitangent vectors for the loaded geometry on the fly
  • Allows you to extract separate meshes and groups from the loaded geometry
  • Can group the vertices by their material

  • Can reindex extracted meshes to reduce the number of vertices

  • Read more about geometry loading

How are the bindings achieved?

Instead of porting function by function manually, PHP-GLFW parses the OpenGL specs to generate most of this C extension. Adjustments are made manually where necessary.