Croquet 2d/3d UI question

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Sat Aug 2 19:30:38 UTC 2003


Hi,

I want to create a UI element that contains both 2D and 3D widgets.  I
would like it to look like a TWindowMorph containing some sliders and
menus, as well as a display of a 3D scene.  I want to display this
widget inside a Croquet world (ie: pretty much like a space browser,
except with 3D widgets as well as 2D).

I'm confused about how to approach this.  TWindowMorphs look plausible
for straight 2D, but don't seem right for a mixture of 2D/3D widgets,
since (as I understand it) the 3D widget would be rendered on the GPU,
read back into CPU memory (slow), composited with the other 2D/3D
widgets, and upload the changed texture to the GPU as usual.

Here's a question that might help me understand things: is the backing
morph approach used because it is faster than drawing each individual
element with the GPU, or just because it was easier than making sure
everything draws identically in OpenGL, or some other reason?  It seems
like rendering directly to a texture would work well for 2D/3D widgets.

Did this make any sense?
Joshua



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