Re: Porting_Geomview_to_SunSparcZX+NPGL

[daeron]

> hi, thanx for your reply. i had installed a geomview-sun.x11-beta and it works
> perfect. The response speed is really amazing and i enjoy playing with it! 
> I have been doing  graphics programming on Sun using different graphics 
> packages (Xlib, Phigs+, VOGL, XGL, NPGL). the performance of X-Geomview
> is impressive and beyond my expectation of graphics performance on an 
> ordinary SunSparc1+. Also i finished porting Geomview to Sun with NPGL. 
> Compared with X-Geomview, NPGL-Geomview is slower and the user-interface looks
>  poor. I understand that X-Geomview only provides much simpler graphics 
> calculations ( such as only Z depth sorting for hlhs-removal and only flat 
> shading). I really want to get better graphics effects than what current X-
> Geomview provides. I got a SunSparc10ZX with 24 bit color and hardware Z-buffer.
> From your mail i learn that you are incorporating GL (OpenGL?) graphics into
> X-Geomview. Are you planning to port Geomview to some Sun native graphics 
> library, such as XGL? I am familiar with XGL ( once i developed a C++/obj. ori.
> interface to it ) and i am really interested in porting X-Geomview to Sun using
> XGL. Could i get the source codes of X-Geomview from you?
> thanx in advance
> yigong
> 
> 

Hi!

  Hmm... I guess I was wondering, and I think others here might share my
interest, about whether we can get a copy of the binary for geomview
(GL graphics) running on the sparcstation. We'd be interested to see what it
looks like and what sort of performance it has. Even though we don't have any
sparcstations equipped with special hardware it should still work, right?

As far as incorporating GL into X-geomview, it is indeed happening. We don't
yet have the OpenGL libraries so I am currently using the mggl library, which
is on top of Iris-GL, to render into the camera X window created by xgeomview.
To get xgeomview to have this behavior just requires compiling with the -DMGGL
option. Compiling with the -DMGX11 option, of course, creates a binary that
renders with plain Xlib calls. Thus, xgeomview can be set to render either
with raw X or with GL! Porting should be fairly simple if you have NPGL.
However, the current GL X-geomview isn't functioning perfectly yet. There are
still a few things to iron out.

To answer your final question, the source code of X-geomview should be
available via ftp, in a day or two, in the same place you found the sun-beta
binary. It is known to compile with Motif 1.1 and the X11R5 libraries.

Enjoy,

Daeron
daeron at geom.umn.edu