Andreas,
I finally made some time to experiment with Squeak's 3D graphics. Using a Wonderland w/o an editor seemed the way to go, as I'm guessing that by the time I got Balloon3D to do what I wanted, I'd have created a buggy version of Alice anyway. Reasonable?
Alice's terminology was a _slight_ hinderance, because I know just enough (though not much) about 3D graphics to expect different conventions. Even so, with the Squeak books handy, I had stuff floating around on the screen under (horribly simplistic) user control in just a few hours.
I'm really just getting started, but, the performance so far is fine on my P4. It appears not to be adequate on my P2-400 and a P3 here in my office, but, I'm not yet using hardware acceleration.
Interestingly, the same P2 was happy with slightly more graphics using Dolphin's DirectX kit. My guess is that hardware acceleration was the key. But, I can't prove it because enabling acceleration on that machine in Squeak causes a crash. I have a dump if it will help.
Much to my surprise, my P4 experienced a reduction(!!) in frame rate with acceleration enabled. Same on the P3, but I hear lots of disk activity, so maybe that's the problem? The P3 has "only" 128MB of RAM, so with win2k, it's not the fastest machine. However, it's also possible that I don't have the machines properly configured. Is there a way to tell whether Balloon3D is happy with the setup?
Is there a way to disable shading? Some of what I want to display would actually be better as wire frames anyway.
Bill
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254
Email: bills@anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029
On Mon, Apr 29, 2002 at 10:45:25AM -0500, Bill Schwab wrote:
Andreas,
No, but I'll do my best.
<snip>
Much to my surprise, my P4 experienced a reduction(!!) in frame rate with acceleration enabled. Same on the P3, but I hear lots of disk activity, so maybe that's the problem? The P3 has "only" 128MB of RAM, so with win2k, it's not the fastest machine. However, it's also possible that I don't have the machines properly configured. Is there a way to tell whether Balloon3D is happy with the setup?
Are there any morphs overlapping the accelerated window? If so, that will pretty much kill performance. Andreas once explained why, but I can't remember.
Joshua
Is there a way to disable shading? Some of what I want to display would actually be better as wire frames anyway.
Bill
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D. University of Florida Department of Anesthesiology PO Box 100254 Gainesville, FL 32610-0254
Email: bills@anest4.anest.ufl.edu Tel: (352) 846-1285 FAX: (352) 392-7029
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