Re: [Chicken-users] Anyone have opengl examples?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Matthew Welland wrote:
> I'm trying to learn opengl and use chicken. This is proving to be a 
> non-trivial exercise :-)
>
> Does anyone have any working opengl code examples they can share? I am 
> specifically having trouble with tesselation of polygons but any and all 
> examples would be interesting.
>   

I do not.  However, 1 month from now, it is my ambition to begin work on 
a "proper" OpenGL binding for Chicken Scheme, as well as examples of 
procedural content via hand-coded Scheme.  This is my opening salvo for 
taking over the game industry.  Additionally, the demos will be used for 
promoting LispSea, the currently forming Seattle Lisp chapter.  
http://wiki.alu.org/LispSea for those interested.  The principal 
organizer is a Common Lisp pundit, but he currently recognizes that Lisp 
is weak in Seattle and he needs to cast the net wider to include 
Scheme.  My aim is to have Chicken Scheme be the best possible Scheme or 
Lisp solution for any Windows OpenGL game developer.

I also plan to cooperate with Common Lisp developers when and if they 
get SBCL fully ported to Windows.  It's likely to happen as they already 
have a pre-release, but I won't hold my breath on how long it takes them 
to be ready for prime time.  I dumped Bigloo Scheme, went through a CL 
booster phase, then dumped that because there weren't any meaningful C 
FFI standards in the CL world, let alone any OpenGL standards.  Each CL 
implementation was "a right unto itself" and that's no different than 
the Scheme universe.  There were no compiled, standardized, 
well-supported open source CLs available on Windows last year.  GCL 
certainly didn't meet the bar of "well supported," for instance, and 
CLISP is well supported but not compiled.  Corman Lisp was available for 
$250, but I wasn't confident in its future and didn't feel like locking 
in.  So I landed on Chicken Scheme, trading some performance for a 
better license, a slightly bigger community, and some C++ support.  And 
also as it turns out, which I didn't expect, more control over its 
future.  In the sense of what platforms Chicken Scheme will ultimately 
build on, and be made available for.

So, CL cooperation will probably mean getting them to bind OpenGL the 
same way, aggregating examples with documentation and treating them 
similarly, dealing with 3D file format imports similarly, and other 
meta-organizational issues.  But this is all contingent on CLers 
carrying their own ball.  I'm not going to do both, my priority is 
Chicken Scheme.  If Chicken Scheme ends up being a better real world 
game development solution than anything the CL community is willing to 
do, I have no problem with that at all.  I made my investment decision 9 
months ago when I started the CMake build.  It would take a large amount 
of $$$$$ for me to change my tune, and I don't see anyone beating down 
the doors of the game industry to use either CL or Scheme.  It's up to 
me to prove the business model, so I'll do it with my choice of tools.

If anyone is interested in assisting with my goal, let me know.  
Otherwise, relax and bring some marshmellows.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every