World: r3wp

Max - I like your idea of 1 callback dispatcher per one extension! 
It is just elegant enough to start with! It is the opposite of rxi 
principles (rxi_call), just on rebol side ... I will try to support 
it with Carl ...

:-)

What I would like to look into is the possibility of speed-up of 
GUI refresh. Not 3D based GUI, just a refresh/rendering/blitting 
- whatever is possible. Cyphre told me, he has general DLL, which 
allows to accelerate even R2 faces ...

But - OTOH I know that we were looking into jitblit etc. mechanism. 
It can be probably done in more than one way ...

OpenGL is display agnostic.  you can render stuff in any perspective... 
or none, if you want.

The only issue is that some devices might not yet have an OpenGL 
devide installed... smartphones, for example.

we could use whatever is native for particular hosts,e .g.  DirectX 
for Windows ...

Not worth it... it basically means doing it all over again.

IIRC there is a standard called miniGL which is a subset of OpenGL 
specificaly designed for smaller devices... it should be compilable 
on anything, even if you don't have hardware 3d AFAIK.

All I want is smooths fast amiga like scrolling, which does not consume 
90% of my CPU :-)

I need it for our advertising system :-)

OpenGL really is on every serious OS in any case, and the standard 
is very well supported, so that if you target a minimal version of 
OpenGL, your app will be pretty much the same on every OS...

gfx will be a little different pixel wise, but not enough to really 
be an issue, especially if you take a few precautions.

I've got impression, that OGL is slowly dying, and feature lacking, 
in comparison to DirectX?

Max - thas is something I don't agree with - turning whole View into 
3D model. You should talk to Cyphre. AGG is pixel precise, 3D stuff 
can differ per GFX card, per driver version. I would accelerate only 
blitting.

Direct X is only windows.

Yes, R3 Windows version is only Windows :-) But DirectX is preinstalled 
on all Windows systems, including Mobile me thinks ... Each Host 
layer will differ on particular platforms anyway, no?

I don't mind using OGL, if it means = easily to run anywhere. What 
I don't want is turning View into OGL and then complaining, why does 
my UI looks differently on each gfx card :-)

I thought that it is a "standard", so that everything is supposed 
to look pixel precise on all gfx cards, whereas it seems the situation 
is like with browser - they differ in details ...

but my OpenGL extension is not to replace view.  Its for gaming, 
and a totally new GUI experience...

for Gaming, OK then ...

IIRC Flash was facing similar situation - first Flash 10 used HW 
acceleartion, then they shut it down due to incompatiblities, then 
they started to put it back upon user's request. Dunno if I am correct 
here, but I remember something like that ...

but Glass will be built exclusively using OpenGL... its going to 
be vastly superior to AGG in what it can do.  never mind pixel details... 
we will have millions of concurrent objects on screen all in real 
time.

I am talking Elixir OS here  :-)

hosted or stand-alone.  with Binary code being controled by the high-level 
master... REBOL

i'd like to target QNX as the kernel but their gfx hardware support 
isn't too good... so its probably going to a linux kernel... but 
without anything else than the HW driver and most basic kernel stuff.

I've got impression, that OGL is slowly dying, and feature lacking, 
in comparison to DirectX?


I don't see that. All *NIXs use OpenGL. OS X GUI is based on OpenGL. 
Playstation 3 use OpenGL (PS1 and PS2 used a proprietary Sony API).

From http://www.opengl.org/

The Khronos(TM) Group, today announced OpenGL(R) 3.2, the third major 
update in twelve months to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics 
API (application programming interface) for personal computers and 
workstations.

It seems, OpenGL is growing.

Maybe I live way too much in Windows world, which is expecting super 
duper DX11 to come to HW near you :-)

yess which only a minority of HW in the world support...  since its 
blocked via VISTA.

which basically sucks.

Maxim wrote: "gfx will be a little different pixel wise"


Do you mean, 2D graphics will look at bit different, if using OpenGL?

Geomol - Cyphre told me, that you could map parts of AGG to HW acceleration, 
but then it can look differently on each gfx card/driver ..

anyhow... OGL is the most widely used 3D library in the world... 
all scientific, professional gfx, multi-platform games, and more 
use OGL... and as John says, all 3d not on windows is OGL.

I don't know details of course - we would have to ask Cyphre ...

yes... 2D graphics will look different, depending on the graphics 
themselves.

If you turn any HW filtering off, graphics should look 100% the same, 
as I understand it.

all cards have different pipelines which calculate specific arythmetic 
in different order and with various optimisations.  texture mapping 
algorithms are different, and even the anti-aliasing is done differently 
from one card to another... unless you go with very basic settings 
which are equal on all cards.

But if you use HW to do anti-aliasing and filtering, things can look 
differently.

the coordinate systems don't have the same precision on all cards.

very basic settings
 = better use SW rendering? :-)

AFAIK 2D on openGL is just the fact of using a flat camera (orthogonal 
perspective) with a camera looking straight down.

what can happen is that between polygons, some edges will have seams 
on some cards and be very clean on other better cards

in an application I use, there is an artifact where the perspective 
of the camera offsets coordinates in the y of *some* polygons  .... 
very strange bug...

When using a Mac, you look at an OpenGL output. If you use the zoom 
function, there is a key combination to put anti-alias on/off. If 
it's off, you see the correct pixels, as there is in the drawing 
(bitmap). But you're right, if you put in anti-aliasing and other 
effects, it can look different on different hardware.

that sucks, no? :-) I thought that  standard is standard :-)

They should submit it to W3C :-)

very basic settings

  means no fancy shader stuff and simple texture use... like geomol 
  says, no filtering, no AA... but that also means blistering fast 
  gfx.

Who cares of blistering fast GFX apart from games, when you can't 
have the same anti-aliased font output on your form? :-)

some details like the coordinate precision and various occlusion 
optimisations, being done differently can affect the output... like 
if you superimpose two polygons with the exact coordinates... some 
cards will remove one of the polys... others (most) will cause pixels 
to shift from one poly to the other everytime you refresh... causing 
a very annoying shimering.

well, noting that all OGL antialising is about 2000 times prettier 
than AGG's  I don't mind  ;-)