From: John P . Looney (valen at domain redbrick.dcu.ie)
Date: Tue 13 Apr 1999 - 12:15:43 IST
On Sat, Apr 10, 1999 at 12:39:27PM +0100, Emmanuel Stone mentioned:
> I would like to try and bring the 3D engine code over to linux and fiddle
> around with it, but i am unsure of the way to go about this. It was written
> using Borland environments and libs so i would need to be able to use
> equivilant functions under linux. Also is there a nice friendly programming
> environment (no emacs is not 'friendly') for linux similar to borland's?
> with syntax highlighting and possibly a gui? (am i asking too much here).
> It's not a problem if there isn't but sometimes i think i am the only
> person that finds it easier to work in a GUI.
> Anyway i'm rambling now
>
> I never actually wrote a renderer for the 3D engine , is there something
> like this already done for linux, also what exactly is MESA?
I've done some 3D programming in Linux, so I'll explain the best way of
going at it:
Get Mesa 3.0. It's a OpenGL 1.2 implementation on linux. OpenGL is a
smashing API. The red book is in Hodges figgis. Thing is, unaccelerated,
OpenGL is as slow as a NT box covered in radioactive treacle with voltage
problems running all distributed.net's clients at the same time.
However, Mesa with 3DFX support, on a VoodooII runs like a hot snot. You
should (with a lot of effort) be able to port the 3D engine to Mesa, and
that'll do all the rendering for you. With functions like glEnable(GL_BLEND);
to enable alpha blending, it's a piece of cake.
Get Mesa 3.1beta RPMs from http://rufus.w3.org/linux/RPM/MByName.html
(you need Mesa, Mesa-devel, Mesa-glut and Mesa-glut-devel). There are a
load of environment variables you need to set if you want hardware
acceleration & stuff too. There is some old code I used to play with
here: http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~valen
Expect about 0.2 frames a second without 3D acceleration, and about 30 fps
with a 4MB standard Voodoo.
Kate
-- 'As my grandmother used to say, as she worked away on her spinning wheel, "Those who do not remember history, are doomed to repeat it, especially if they change the addressing modes, or wordsize of their architechture"' - Peter Van Der Linden
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