Now that I finally have some level of hardware 3D acceleration working at all on my linux computer, Istarted to look at wheather Squeak is able to access it.
Attempting to toggle hardware acceleration with the menu checkbox was ineffectual.
Now I have these questions:
1. On what platforms is hardware 3D acceleration supported? 2. What things need to be done to make it work on linux?
My actual motovation for poking around with Squeak's 3D facilities comes from my good old AI project. The development plan which I am in the process of writing calls for a 3D environment with a very good facimilie of a physicality, implementing all of newtonian physics if not some parts of the laws of thermodynamics.
The present implementation appears to be purely a rendering engine. Does anyone have any suggestions on where I should go to learn about how to add physical simulation features to the engine?
I had attempted to make a posting that included some comments about a possible VM enhancement from the image itself with mixed results. I'll repeat them here because I don't think many people were able to read the earlier posting.
In working on the VM, I noticed that it actually had 3 stacks instead of the two mentioned to me earlier. These include the parameters stack, the context stack, and the hardware stack.
While a fair ammount of effort has gone into minimizing the use of the hardware stack, for good reason apparently, It _MIGHT_ be advantageous to attempt to combine either of the two software-managed stacks with the hardware stack for the sake of conserving registers and reducing the number of data items that need to be maintained explicitly by the VM code.
I was wondering if anyone had done any work along these lines or may be able to point me to an argument that shows the current design to be superior.