[geeks] PHEAR ME

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Sat, Apr 27, 2002 at 05:15:06PM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:

> Okay, so C++ seems to be gathering critisms from people who's opinions I
> respect :)
> 
> Well, primarily what I want to do is to create this piece of software
> that allows woodworkers to build and view, in 3 dimensions, projects
> before they actually start cutting wood.  If you recallthat
> conversation, maybe you have an idea of what language would be ideal for
> that?
> 
> I'm thinking OpenInventor, which apparently has a lot of C++ stuff or
> references C++ or has C++ libraries or whatever......or maybe that was
> C....
> 
> Fuck, I gotta go read that again.
> 
> I just got finished roughing in a piece of furniture this afternoon, and
> I really could have used this piece of software to avoid the one minor
> mistake I made today...

>From the openinventor faq @sgi.com:
Does Inventor require C++?
No. You can use the C API and never see or use C++. However, subclassing to extend the toolkit does require C++.

Does Inventor work with the GNU C++ compiler?
No, Inventor requires SGI's C++ compiler. The GNU C++ compiler and SGI's C++ compiler produce incompatible code, and SGI does not ship an Inventor library compatible with GNU C++. 

Anyway, the advantage of inventor is that it is a nice scene graph api.  If 
that is all it does, it is pretty easy to do without.  But, it quite probably
also does stuff to make it easy to manipulate objects in the scene.

I might say to go with Python or vPython, but I'm not sure if there is a ready
made binding for an adequate substitute to open inventor, but you could 
always write your own.

Squeak on windows would be pretty good place to work.  I'm hoping that the
3D stuff works as well on linux and Irix, but frankly I've never tried.

>From a mouse interaction in 3D point of view, I'm trying to hammer out the
details in a platform and toolkit non-specific manner for arbitrary camera
views (as opposed to only the views from the axis like a lot of freeware
programs do).  It would be easy to use with any GUI toolkit and OpenGL, but
I don't think that Python works with OpenGL except via GTKGLArea, so this
limits you pretty thoroughly to Irix, Linux, and other Unix/X11 platforms.
Thankfully, I don't think anything is required beyond GTK, GTKGLArea, and
Python, all of which compile very nicely on non linux platforms.

However, if you wrote it in the language of your choice on only one platform,
it wouldn't be hard to get someone to do really good native ports to other
platforms, like Mac OS X, Windows, etc.

You probably would want to work in some sort of constraint system, which
is a field that starts out easy, but gets hard fast.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd