Hi all!  I was wondering if there was any interest in putting together a
group to create the ultimate Modeller/Animation system for POV?  I've
got a ton  of ideas, and started to try and program it, but never got to
far.  My skills just aren't good enough to get the job done.

I've stumbled across a C++ library that allows you to write one
interface, and compile it into a number of different OS's, including
Win95 and Linux.  I thought that this would be perfect.  If there is any
interest, email me or, better yet, respond in the newsgroup....

Thanks
Lonnie Ezell

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I would be interested in working on such a project.

Lloyd

Lonnie Ezell <lez### [at] pcisnet> wrote in article
<3563B857.5A20E0EB@pcis.net>...
> Hi all!  I was wondering if there was any interest in putting together a
> group to create the ultimate Modeller/Animation system for POV?  I've
> got a ton  of ideas, and started to try and program it, but never got to
> far.  My skills just aren't good enough to get the job done.
> 
> I've stumbled across a C++ library that allows you to write one
> interface, and compile it into a number of different OS's, including
> Win95 and Linux.  I thought that this would be perfect.  If there is any
> interest, email me or, better yet, respond in the newsgroup....
> 
> Thanks
> Lonnie Ezell
> 
>

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Better than that C++ and that library, I'd suggest going with Java.

I'm open to helping on such a project.

(Please, no Holy Wars on this one :)



Lonnie Ezell wrote:
> 
> Hi all!  I was wondering if there was any interest in putting together a
> group to create the ultimate Modeller/Animation system for POV?  I've
> got a ton  of ideas, and started to try and program it, but never got to
> far.  My skills just aren't good enough to get the job done.
> 
> I've stumbled across a C++ library that allows you to write one
> interface, and compile it into a number of different OS's, including
> Win95 and Linux.  I thought that this would be perfect.  If there is any
> interest, email me or, better yet, respond in the newsgroup....
> 
> Thanks
> Lonnie Ezell

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Jon A. Cruz wrote:

> Better than that C++ and that library, I'd suggest going with Java.
>
> I'm open to helping on such a project.
>
> (Please, no Holy Wars on this one :)
>

I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide the
speed and power that this sort of program would need?

I'd be more than willing to learn it if everyone thinks it can handle it.  It
would definitely provide the compatibility...

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Lonnie Ezell <lez### [at] pcisnet> wrote:
: I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide the
: speed and power that this sort of program would need?

  You are completely right. I don't like the idea of waiting 10 seconds for
the program to redraw the wireframe, etc.
  I think java is extremely overestimated. I think that in 99.9% of the
computers you have to run the java program in a slow javavm-emulation, and,
besides, the java support of many systems and programs is really deficient.
  I have coded a rather big project with a friend in java, and we were
surprised when it didn't work in almost any system! We coded it to work
with netscape 3 and appletviewer in a sparcstation. Then we tested it with
netscape 4 on the same machine: it didn't work well. We tested it in
win95: none of the netscape versions run it fine, and msie didn't run it
at all!
  Java definitely is not "write once, run everywhere". We wrote it once, and
it didn't run everywhere. We have to write it again if we want it to work
in other systems than netscape3/sparc.
  Also the program is deadly slow (actually it was a very simple
modeller for povray). When there was about 100-200 lines to draw on screen,
in a pentium150 it was a pain to use. With a program written in C you can
draw over 10000 lines faster than that.
  What's the problem with C++ anyways?

-- 
                                                              - Warp. -

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Nieminen Mika wrote:
> 
> Lonnie Ezell <lez### [at] pcisnet> wrote:
> : I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide the
> : speed and power that this sort of program would need?
> 
>   You are completely right. I don't like the idea of waiting 10 seconds for
> the program to redraw the wireframe, etc.
>   I think java is extremely overestimated. I think that in 99.9% of the
> computers you have to run the java program in a slow javavm-emulation, and,
> besides, the java support of many systems and programs is really deficient...

Well, there needs to be a distinction drawn in what you are speaking
about. It appears that you are mainly talking about experience with Java
Applets, which are a different animal than full Java applications.

With the current JIT Compilers on Windows, performance is greatly
increased. Also, the VM's in most browsers may not be the best, but a
stand-alone app can use the latest and greatest.

More importantly is the problem being addressed and the manner in which
the solution is approached. Given my general understanding of the
problem, I'd have to say that most of it could be done with Java.
Breaking things down into modeller and animator would be a logical
separation. The animator should have no problem in Java. The modeller
would have the most potential for performance problems.

Taking the modeller separately, I'll guess what the problems might be.
Probably screen update speed is the main factor. Now, an applet might
have some major problems with this, but given a stand-alone application
it would be possible to take advantage of one of the specific Java API's
such as Java2D or Java3D (which can be calling OpenGL).

If need be, a simple native method could be written to do the screen
display. In general it's much the same as doing a C++ Widows app. You
don't try to
call SetPixel() for each pixel on screen.


Bottom line is, I'm not trying to say that a animator/modeller done in
Java will
be just as fast, but that done correctly it would be fast enough for the
problem at hand. Especially if it had OpenGL support.


For simple examples of something done with no extension API's, try:

http://java.sun.com/applets/MoleculeViewer/example1.html
http://java.sun.com/applets/MoleculeViewer/example2.html
http://java.sun.com/applets/MoleculeViewer/example3.html

http://java.sun.com/applets/WireFrame/example1.html
http://java.sun.com/applets/WireFrame/example2.html
http://java.sun.com/applets/WireFrame/example3.html
http://java.sun.com/applets/WireFrame/example4.html

(those were from http://java.sun.com/applets/js-applets.html )

For more on the mentioned API's:

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/index.html
http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/index.html

http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/forDevelopers/NTR.html







BTW, if you want to really see a bad solution to a problem, check out
the results of the VJ++ Applet Wizard.  :P

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On 21 May 1998 16:49:39 GMT, Nieminen Mika <war### [at] assaricctutfi>
wrote:

>Lonnie Ezell <lez### [at] pcisnet> wrote:
>: I don't know anything about Java's capabilities...Can it really provide the
>: speed and power that this sort of program would need?
>
>  You are completely right. I don't like the idea of waiting 10 seconds for
>the program to redraw the wireframe, etc.

I'm sure the Amiga and DOS users among us aren't too thrilled with
waiting for Java to be available for their machines, either.  But I'll
stop there, so as to avoid a holy war.

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I would be interested in such a project, and hopefully I would have
something to offer skill wise.

Regarding languages, POVray is written in C and seems to have achieved
cross-platform penetration quite nicely.  Language is obviously NOT an
issue.

My thoughts are for either C or C++ to be used, however Object Oriented
Design is new and generally people have very different ideas as to what is
the best design in that.  POV is not Object Oriented but this is not
neccessarily a problem.

Your thoughts please....

Regards Stuart Anderson.

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While ANSI C/C++ applications are easily portable to many operating systems,
the GUI's are not remotely compatible.  So, what would have to be done is for
the GUI to be written to look and function very similar for each platform
seperately, while reusing the internal code.  Even then, I'm not sure exactly
how much would be usable, but it should be enough to make it worth while.

As mentioned previously, a cross-platform GUI library exists for C++ that
creates interfaces for:  Windows 3.1, 95, NT 4.0, almost all varieties of
UNIX/Linux using Motif, XView & XT, and Mac support to come soon...  Alas,
that would still leave out the Amiga and DOS platforms... I haven't used this
so I cannot say how good it works/ doesn't work!  :)

check it out here:
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/julian.smart/wxwin/

As far as Java goes, I have done any programming in it, but after checking out
the examples and documentation, it doesn't look to bad.  Definitely check out
the examples though, they're fairly impressive as far as speed goes...  But
again, OpenGL goes across several platforms too...

Just some items for thought...

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On Fri, 22 May 1998 14:13:33 +1000, "Stuart Anderson"
<stu### [at] backmeupnetau> wrote:

>POV is not Object Oriented but this is not
>neccessarily a problem.

Contrary to popular belief, POV is object-oriented.  It's just not
written in any of the OO camp's favorite languages.  It takes a bit
more work to achieve OO in C, but remember that the first C++
compilers were just frontends for C compilers.  POV even has virtual
function tables, and has since at least V2.2 (when I started hacking
the code - it probably has been OO for even longer.)

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