View previous topic :: View next topic |
Author |
Message |
vdsalchemist Admin Team
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 Posts: 1448 Location: Florida, USA
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
Rubes_sw Valued Contributor
Joined: 11 Jun 2001 Posts: 625 Location: Northern Ireland
|
Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 8:05 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Very Cool !
Nathan
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
vdsalchemist Admin Team
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 Posts: 1448 Location: Florida, USA
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
vdsalchemist Admin Team
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 Posts: 1448 Location: Florida, USA
|
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.
_________________ Home of
Give VDS a new purpose!
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
Aslan Valued Contributor
Joined: 31 May 2001 Posts: 589 Location: Memphis, TN USA
|
Posted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 9:31 pm Post subject: |
|
|
Very Nice!
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
vdsalchemist Admin Team
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 Posts: 1448 Location: Florida, USA
|
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.
Code: |
OPTION PRIORITY,HIGH
OPTION SLEEPTIME,1
|
This just chews up your CPU but makes for an impressive demo
_________________ Home of
Give VDS a new purpose!
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
DaveR Valued Contributor
Joined: 03 Sep 2005 Posts: 413 Location: Australia
|
Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 3:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
Aslan wrote: | Very Nice! |
Yep, very nice indeed.
If by SDL you're referring to 'Simple DirectMedia Layer' then technically it's not free as in freeware. It's distributed under GNU LGPL version 2.
_________________ cheers
Dave |
|
Back to top |
|
|
vdsalchemist Admin Team
Joined: 23 Oct 2001 Posts: 1448 Location: Florida, USA
|
Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 10:57 am Post subject: |
|
|
DaveŽ wrote: |
If by SDL you're referring to 'Simple DirectMedia Layer' then technically it's not free as in freeware. It's distributed under GNU LGPL version 2. |
Dave,
Yes Free as in no coin or paper money is required to use the software as part of your product for commercial or free. With that said I always give credit where credit is due. Also when it comes to open source software I normally send an email to the authors requesting permission to use their software with mine reguardless if I plan to sale my software or not. I do this out of respect for the authors. I also display their copyright somewhere promnately in my software and documentation. I do this for all third party software that my software uses even software that I bought and paid for. Emails are called insurance in this game. If you use this method you will be protected and will not need to worry about it byting you later.
_________________ Home of
Give VDS a new purpose!
|
|
Back to top |
|
|
|