[Q] Alice / Wonderland models and performance?

Brian T. Rice water at tunes.org
Sun Apr 21 20:11:50 UTC 2002


Hi all,
I'm writing up a little simulator lately, and would like to have it 
representable and maybe controllable within a 3d interface. To that end, 
what's the most direct way to get a basic human form into Alice? I've 
been told that the original Alice project's file format has changed 
since the Squeak port, and I haven't used Squeak's 3D capabilities at 
all aside from toying with Squeak's single demo. My hope is that there's 
already one available, of course, that fits Squeak's input format. I 
don't need anything fancy, atm, just something with articulated limbs 
and such (the old-school method of rendering each part with a polyhedron 
comes to mind ;).

Now, I've working on video game graphics engine design and optimization 
before, even for model formats, and a cursory look at Alice and 
Wonderland indicates that it does all of its scene-culling using 
polygon-analysis alone, instead of including logic for, say, convex 
hulls and their analyses. This suggests that it doesn't really scale 
well unless I layer some logic over it to avoid a scene-rendering where 
it has to sort millions of polygons for each frame. I'd like to include 
some good logic for convex hulls, but to be honest I don't know where to 
begin. What can you tell me?

TIA
~




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