On 17.11.2015, at 00:28, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 16-11-2015, at 2:04 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de> wrote:
>> Balloon3D (and hence the Squeak3D plugin) has pretty much gone the way of the dodo.
> 
> Ah, sad. If anyone is interested, it can actually be loaded with some hassle and that rotating cube does work, so maybe it could be rescued? Is is worth it?

By now CPUs are fast enough that the B3D software renderer (in the Squeak3D plugin) should be quite speedy. And some of the old demos have been quite neat. Remember the 3D bunny circling *behind* a Morphic window? Or the whole Wonderland animation system.

But software rendering takes lots of power to make even a very simple (i.e. unrealistic) 3D rendering. It doesn’t scale to modern pixel densities. So we would still need the B3D acceleration scheme to make it run on modern screens (my laptop has 5 MPixels!)

One advantage of Balloon3D is that it can use both OpenGL and Direct3D. But maybe OpenGL support is now good enough even on Windows? I don’t know, I’m not a Windows user.

In the end, using OpenGL directly is way more flexible (and better documented). 

- Bert -

>> But B3DAcceleratorPlugin is still used to create an OpenGL context, e.g. in Croquet.
>> 
>>> Is there somewhere other than SM I might find an up to date version - or indeed anything else that would test the B3DAcceleratorPlugin?
>> 
>> Install OpenGL from here:
>> 
>> 	http://www.squeaksource.com/CroquetGL.html
>> 
>> and try “OpenGL example”.
> 
> OK, loaded easily enough and the example shows that the plugin is not working. It responds to the primitiveVersion ok but creating a gl context fails. I’ll poke it into gdb some day.
> 
> It’s nice to see vectors and quaternions in there though. Might help me with the damnably complex IMU in the Pi SenseHAT.
> 
> 
> tim
> --
> tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
> Strange OpCodes: EROS: Erase Read-Only Storage
> 
> 
> 

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