enhancements to wonderland and B3D sensible?

Andreas Raab andreas.raab at gmx.de
Sat Mar 27 13:41:54 UTC 2004


Serge,

> I think we have the same problem in my team, we are working
> on a 3D robots simulator with Wonderland/B3B. When Croquet
> will be out, do we have to rebuild everything or there is
> something like a compatibility layer beetween the two 3D
> graphics engine ?

To be honest, I haven't spent much time thinking about this problem. A
compatibility layer between Wonderland/B3D and Croquet isn't very high up in
our priority list (and I'm not sure it'll ever get there). But generally, I
think it's fair to say that:

* adapting straight rendering code is fairly simple - all of the B3D calls
have equivalents in OpenGL (which Croquet uses) so writing a compatibility
renderer class which translates the calls would be absolutely doable
(fortunately, I kept the B3D interface fairly small ;-)

* adapting more complex rendering code (say, lighting, transparency, etc)
will be more complex - these things were never fully supported in
B3D/Wonderland and for exactly the reason that the framework needs to define
certain rules for how these things ought to work. Croquet does and so there
are some assumptions about "what happens in which order" and we expect code
to adhere to these assumptions or bear the consequences ;-)

* adapting any existing "time-based behavior" to the collaboration
environment will be Very Hard - there are fundamental differences in the
object model that Croquet uses for collaboration compared to what is in
Squeak in general and Wonderland in particular. So while it may be possible
to run Wonderland animations inside Croquet don't expect it to be
synchronized and don't expect you'll be able to fix that in an afternoon.

Cheers,
  - Andreas




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