Open GL tools

jbv jbv.silences at Club-Internet.fr
Sat Aug 14 12:01:01 EDT 2004


Hi guys,

>
> >> Somebody was doing some work on it, but apparently gave up. Kevin
> >> Miller was trying to get it back on track, but it didn't sound very
> >> positive to me. Who knows?
>
> Apparently, Scott knows something more. ;-)
>
> However, the last messages which were posted to this list from the
> iGames folks were extremely negative in tone, and indicated that they
> were pretty luke-warm on completing it. It would be good to hear that
> they were actually going to finish it.
> --

on the subject of Rev & openGL, here are my 2 cents :

about 1.5 year ago I spent some time on the project of interfacing Rev
with openGL, and I can say that displaying (in Rev) images built in
realtime with openGL is very easy (I have code for an external for
Mac & Windows).
HOWEVER, sending requests to the openGL engine via a Rev script
seems as easy at first, but pretty soon brings lots of headaches,
especially
if you want to keep the benefit of realtime interaction.
IOW I came to the conclusion that expecting full control of openGL from
Rev via an external will take us to a dead end.

For the moment, I can see 2 options only :

1- for each project you'll have to code a specific external in C that does
all the job,
while Rev is only used for mouse / kbd events, and 3D ouput images display
(which is what I've done so far for a couple of personal projects including

realtime 3D : it works ok, but 95% of the job is straight C programing)

2- adding a large set of commands and properties in Transcript (for the
equivalents
in openGL). As of yet, this can be done only by RunRev development crew,
and I'm not sure where it stands on their list of priorities (needless to
say it's a
huge task).
As mentioned in a recent thread, giving the possibility to users to extend
the
language would be a HUGE improvement for Rev : such development projects
could be undertaken by several of us (in a similar way as open source
coding).
Think about it : several high end functions could be added to Rev brick by
brick
(realtime 3D and scriptable realtime antialiased 2D vector graphics - both
thru openGL),
scriptable realtime sound processing and MIDI, etc etc.

I'm not a specialist, but I have the feeling that the possibility to extend
the language
would boost the product way beyond it's present status of slightly improved
Xplatform
HyperCard...

JB



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