Tom
The pix stuff is probably not too difficult as it will just be another blitter loop to go from one image buffer type to the other. There is already an object or two that does this correct?
The GL stuff is a bit trickier. GEM currently does everything in immediate mode or using display lists, and none of the actual vertex rendering information is passed between objects. I suppose you could insert other types of viewport, lighting and texture manipulation objects into the chain, but GEM has all of the basics covered. I have recently added some vertex array objects to CVS which do in fact pass raw vertex, color, texcoord and normals between objects much like the pixel processing objects. All of the processing is done by the CPU, but this arrangement makes for very nice and flexible possibilities (and is actually much faster than immediate mode). I would suggest finding a way to integrate your 3D objects into that rather than spend a lot of time with the somewhat obsolete Geos and so on.
Another possibility is the creation of display lists out of user defined chains of objects. This would be more flexible and faster than immediate mode, but really only useful for static data like models, and collections of basic shapes (rectangle, cube, triangles). It would interface very nicely with Cyrille's pmpd package and help performance immensely.
cgc
On Sep 7, 2004, at 1:32 PM, Tom Schouten wrote:
hi,
an open letter to the gem devs :)
i'm not 100% there yet but time has come to start thinking about a direct gem<->pdp/pf plug.
my plans are:
- pix <-> pdp image packet converters
- plug 3dp into the gem 3d render chain
the pixbufs should not pose too many problems.
plugging in the render chain seems relatively easy too. all relevant 3dp code is pure opengl. 3dp objects work like this: accept context packet, draw to or otherwize modify the context, and pass along. the context packet is not really used atm, and serves as a 'bang': the objects draw to the current gl context.
so, i'm fishing for advice.
cheers tom
PD-dev mailing list PD-dev@iem.at http://iem.at/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pd-dev