From: Dave Stampe-Psy+Eng Subject: Re: 386 renderer progress Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1992 05:01:07 GMT Message-ID: <1992Jan10.050107.27332@watserv1.waterloo.edu> Organization: University of Waterloo leech@cs.unc.edu (Jonathan Leech) writes: >In article <1992Jan8.220932.13882@watserv1.waterloo.edu>, broehl@watserv1. >waterloo.edu (Bernie Roehl) writes: > >> I would encourage people using other formats to standardize on OFF, to make >> object-sharing easier. > > OFF has minimal power. It doesn't support surfaces other than >polygons, attributes other the color, or hierarchy, for example. It's >supposedly open to extensions, but that will require agreement on the >extensions. As long as all you want are polygon lists, it's fine. The idea is to write trranslaters from other formats into OFF or an even simpler format. Of course, VR stuff needs even more, as objects must have characteristics. And for decent interaction and renderer performance, there should be some way to support multiple definitions of an object based on distance. Myself, I don't plan to do any of that for now. I will just put a C interface into the renderer, and perhaps a loader to get things started. Then all you high-level people can roll your own drivers, work on standardizong formats, etc. The renderer will just take calls to create visual definitions of an object, move it or modify it. Consider it an enabling tool (like C or a mouse). -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | My life is Hardware, | | | my destiny is Software, | Dave Stampe | | my CPU is Wetware... | | | Anybody got a SDB I can borrow? | dstamp@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca | __________________________________________________________________________