On May 27, 2007, at 22:59 , Dominic Letz wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>
> 1. i'm searching for information or/and documentation about  
> balloon3d its implemention details

Not much there beyond the code and examples.

> 2. 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.

> 3. what details of hardware acceleration does it abstract,

Not sure what you mean - everything?

> 4. 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).

> 5. (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 -