Open GL tools

jbv jbv.silences at Club-Internet.fr
Sat Aug 14 17:28:59 EDT 2004



Ken,

>
> > 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...
>
> Well, as it happens, I'd have to agree with the language-extension thing.
> Providing toolboxes for the major platforms to do that might be daunting,
> though. I see the reasoning behind your anaysis of the one-off OpenGL
> interfaces, but the very thing you did looks like it could provide a model
> for more generic approaches, yes?
>
> Then 'brick' it together at some point.

Mmmh... I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean...
what I did was actually straight C coding and believe, I would have been
more than happy to be able to avoid it and code the whole thing in
Transcript (and avoid the compilation hassle, the Xplat compatibility
problems, the use of 2 different languages simultaneously, etc etc)...

>
>
> But for the last part: For one obvious thing, it has 5x the keywords
> available in the last version of HC. So, I'd have to say it's slightly more
> than slightly more, eh?
>

he he... agreed...
nevertheless, the possibility for users to extend the language would be
(IMHO) a giant leap, coz simply adding keywords extends the number
of avialble functions, but doesn't imply improvement of the paradigm
of the product...
Last but not least, with such a feature, I guess we would be only 1 small
step away from the approach of Rev not as a single engine / black box, but
as a collection of librairies that could be selected at will when building a
standalone...
The discussion already occured on this list : some ppl said that adding 1.5 Mb
of code when building a standalone is no big deal... in many cases it might be
so, but 2 years ago I did a small app for a client who was in the middle of the
desert (don't ask me why) and had only a satellite phone with narrow bwdth
to download it to his laptop... those 1.5 Mb looked huge (especially because
the "really useful" code was less than 1 Kb).
Also when using Rev (actually MC 2.4.3) for a simple screensaver (to be
downloaded by ppl with 56 Kb connections) that made heavy use of
openGL and in which very few Transcript functions were used (namely
mousup, mousedown, get URL and images display)... 1.5 Mb looked huge
when compared to the same app in C...

Best,
JB



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