Hi Andreas and Boris,

If cutting out the croquet engine is not feasable than I'll have to live 
with the stuff that's available :) I'll anyways try to keep the 
intersection between my program and the underlaying graphics system as 
minimal as possible, so that I can later on chose between optimizing 
wonderland, changing to an eventually available advanced croquet 
graphics engine or leave it as it is if time runs out. Using pure B3D 
whould be much more time consuming than building on top of wonderland 
because I'd have to rewrite large parts of what wonderland does, so with 
regards to my very limited timeframe I think I will live with the few 
shortcomings of it for now, and concentrate on the real concern of my 
work first. I can always enhance it later if I'm faster than expected. 
I'll also have a look at VisualWorks.

Thanks for all your advice,

Ferdinand

Andreas Raab wrote:

>Ferdinand,
>
>Since I don't know your concrete constraints it's impossible for me to
>answer a question like "what is more sensible". However, methinks that
>putting "some effort" into fixing Wonderland's lights is a lot less work
>than trying to extract "just the 3D engine" from Croquet - this may very
>well turn out to be impossible and I don't think any of the Croqueteers is
>even going to try (what would be the point?).
>
>Cheers,
>  - Andreas
>
>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "Ferdinand Strixner" <strixner at web.de>
>To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
><squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>Sent: Friday, March 26, 2004 4:41 PM
>Subject: enhancements to wonderland and B3D sensible?
>
>
>  
>
>>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. So here is my question: Is it senisble to put much
>>effort into getting these advanced light types to work in wonderland/B3D
>>if they are obsolete anyway when the new rendering engine gets released
>>as part of croquet? Whouldn't it be more feasable to isolate the 3D
>>engine part of croquet and make a SqueakMap package out of it in order
>>to be able to use it in sqeak until the hole croquet system becomes
>>available?
>>
>>Greetings,
>>
>>Ferdinand
>>
>>
>>    
>>
Boris Gaertner wrote:


> Boris Gaertner wrote:
>
>
>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
>