On May 27, 2007, at 22:59 , Dominic Letz wrote:
Hello everyone,
- i'm searching for information or/and documentation about
balloon3d its implemention details
Not much there beyond the code and examples.
- and the problems it was designed to solve.
As I understand it, providing a cross-platform 3D graphics framework for Squeak. It has a decent software-only renderer but was designed to allow use of hardware acceleration using both OpenGL and Direct3D.
- what details of hardware acceleration does it abstract,
Not sure what you mean - everything?
- and why does croquet does need an extra opengl ffi interface
It gives full access to all OpenGL functionality from Smalltalk without having to deal with C code, allowing rapid experimentation. Croquet's renderer is very much different from Balloon3D, it just uses the B3DAccelerator plugin to create a window (rather than having to deal with GLX/WGL/AGL).
- (why ffi isn't that the slowest way to go compared to a plugin ?)
It's deemed fast enough and much simpler than a plugin.
I wouldn't be surprised if Croquet's ffi-based rendering using VBOs turned out to be faster than Balloon3D rendering.
OTOH, the abstraction that B3D provides is still valuable - I for one wouldn't mind if someone would bring it up to date and add features, in particular because it works on both GL and D3D.
- Bert -