Re: [Chicken-users] 3D games in Chicken

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 2/11/06, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Man this is so early 90s.  Back when we all wrote our own 3D APIs from
> scratch!  Look into OpenGL ES and what devices support it.  ES is supposed
> to be the stripped down version of OpenGL for such gizmos.

Yes it claims to use fixed-point math, just like it should.  So what's
your favorite free implementation then?

klimt claims to be very similar (maybe it's a subset) but not quite
compliant.  Are there licensing issues, or having to pay in order to
claim to be compliant?

>  I stared long and hard at the problem, and concluded that doing 2D via 3D
> HW is the correct way to do things.  You're going to need image rotation and
> scaling operations and so forth.  There's a reason the rest of the industry

I agree.

> went "3D for 2D."  I wouldn't waste time reinventing last decade's thought
> processes on the matter.

I'm plenty lazy enough not to re-do other people's work, as long as
their work is accessible to me.

>  Yeah, so, 2 years from now nobody will care.  You'll waste all this time
> trying to optimize for obsolescent technology.  Reminds me when I was going

I'm talking about phones, the Zaurus, the Nokia 700, etc.  3D games
are starting to show up on phones, presumably using OpenGL ES.  Of
course, maybe in a couple generations they will have real 3D
accelerators but I'm not seeing much of it yet.

>  So what if there was a version of
> Chicken for devices without math coprocessors in which flonums are
> really fixed-point 24.8 format, and another version in which they are
> floating point?
>  Blow off the device that has poor market share.  You know, I wasted my
> early career on trying to make 3D APIs portable to everything, everywhere.
> I ended up with a really spiffy portable 2D rasterization layer, and my 3D
> API barely drew a polygon.  I was also an Autoconf and IMake guru.  It's
> better to pick one platform that's worth *money* and do a decent job on it.

Like what kind of platform?

>  I think I've been there, done that.  I know everyone has to reinvent the
> world anew for themselves, but I hope you heed the warnings of older souls.

I'm probably not as young as you think, just haven't done much 3D, and
try hard not to get too jaded about technology in general, although it
does seem kindof inevitable doesn't it?