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vdsalchemist · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 7:48 pm Post subject: OpenGL with GadgetX DEMO

Hi All,
Just wanted to give you a peek of what I have been working on over this past month. I have attached a demo that uses VDS/GadgetX/OpenGL. It's just a demo and it is Exe only. You will need GadgetX in the path to execute the demo. I will be releasing the source code on my forum as soon as I get a few more demos built.

Rubes_sw · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:05 pm Post subject:

Very Cool !

Nathan

vdsalchemist · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:10 pm Post subject:

Here is a ScreenShot of the demo running in the VDS IDE.

vdsalchemist · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:40 pm Post subject:

Thanks Nathan,
Just so you know this demo did not take a month to write. I spent most of the past month looking for suitable 3D graphics engines that were simple and freely available. Most of those engines had stuff that I did not like or I felt that they required too much of a learning curve. OpenGL is a simple state machine and can be accessed from it's API functions. Due to all the constants and structures it would not be easy to use OpenGL directly with the VDS @lib() function so I decided to build the demos with GadgetX since it has built-in facilities for these and it was less confusing than using @Substr() to parse out the structure fields. Also I had a question about how VDS calls all floating point numbers as REAL's (Delphi implementation of a Double floating point number). Much of the OpenGL functions require Single's. If you try using doubles in place of floats in a function call you can corrupt the functions stack and crash the program.

Here is a few of the 3D engines I looked at.
SDL
RAGE
3DState
Parrot
Xtreme3D
GLFW (OpenGL FrameWork)
OGRE
mmEngine
AC3D
Bolt3D
CrystalSpace
Dreamotion
Genesis3D
Irrlicht
Jet3D
Panda3D
R3D

Out of all these 3D engines there were very few that I liked. The main one that is of interest to me is SDL. Most others want to make their own window which I did not like because I wanted a 3D engine that you could integrate with the VDS Dialog and enhance what was already there. The reason I choose to start writting demos with OpenGL for 1 the DLL comes with windows and or your video card and 2 there is lots of information out there about it and 3 most other 3D engines are wrappers for either OpenGL or DirectX anyway so I am cutting out the middle man so to speak.

After the OpenGL series of demos I will probably do several SDL demos since SDL is more than just a graphics engine it is a full 3D game engine and it is free. Keyword here is free because many of the above have steep Royalities attached for building programs for commercial use with them.

Aslan · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 9:31 pm Post subject:

Very Nice! Surprised

vdsalchemist · Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 9:40 pm Post subject:

Also if you guys have not noticed yet. That demo above uses 100% CPU. This is due to the fact that I am trying to follow along with the tutorials at NeHe In these tutorials they show how they bypass the message pump which gives a little speed to the animation but really hard on the rest of the system. Also for really smooth graphics I used the following lines in the demo.

DaveR · Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 3:08 am Post subject:

vdsalchemist · Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 10:57 am Post subject: