"Ferdinand Strixner" <strixner at web.de> wrote:


> Hi,
> 
> I'm (very likely) going to use squeak and wonderland as basis for my 
> diploma theses. One thing that is somewhat important for this project is 
> lightning. In the last few days I investigated the current state of 
> wonderland - among other things in that concern. With some minor fixes I 
> was able to add all four light types (ambient, positional, directional, 
> spotlight) to a wonderworld but they do not work as expected because at 
> least directional lights and spotlights seem more like a placeholder 
> than a final entity.

Well, first I have to say that I never really tried Wonderland, 
I use only B3D. Have you tried positional lights and spotlights
both with and without hardware acceleration? My impression is
that they work only without hardware acceleration. Also, colors
may change when you switch to acceleration, That is a known bug
that Andreas promised to fix with the next VM.

For some types of light you need meshes with vertex normals.
In an earlier version of B3D you could send the message
#vertexNormals to a B3DIndexedMesh to compute
approximated vertex normals. This changed in Squeak 3.6,
where you have to write:

mesh vertexNormals: mesh computeVertexNormals.

Some examples in class category Balloon3D-Tutorial-Demos
use the message  #vertexNormals which is now wrong.
You can search the senders of  #vertexNormals  to fix
that.


Also, my impression is that B3D is much faster in Squeak 3.7,
that version is certainly worth a try.

----------------------------------

I wish you success for your thesis. Do you know that
VisualWorks for Smalltalk comes with an add-on that is called
"Jun"? Jun (written by AOKI Atushi) is a beautiful framework
for 3D graphics. A non-commercial edition of VisualWorks
is available from http://smalltalk.cincom.com/downloads/index.ssp.
The CD comes with Jun as a goodie.
On this list, you can even contact Helge Novak for information
about that Smalltalk and the CD. Helge is the responsible
CinCom representative in Germany.
It is difficult to compare B3D and Jun; for successful use
both frameworks require a good background in 3d graphics.
There are however some differences and you may wish to
examine both frameworks to find out which one is best
suited to your work.

Greetings,
Boris