On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 10:25, Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 June 2004 20:24, Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
> > ...
> > What utter nonsense!
> 
> Yo Mama.
> 
> > You ever written a 3D device driver? 
> 
> Are you trying to write a device driver in OCaml?

He is. But we're not talking about 'Unix' concept
of a device driver.

his problem is real time generation of graphics
images from models for a *specific* card.
(only you'd like to port the code to other cards too).

Particular cards have particular capabilities and
you have to know when to lose your abstraction
and get specific.

You also need to do things like flick a switch
to turn off Perspective, choose shading models,
etc (Diablo is unplayable on my 500 MHz PIII
unless I turn ALL the fancy graphics off .. and it
still runs way too slow to be playable at advanced levels).

In theory, graphics can ALL be done with

'get_pixel', 'set_pixel'

there is nothing else to do. Its all very nice
and abstract .. and of course that kind of
solution is totally and utterly untenable
even for a GUI .. let alone a game or
instrument demanding 10-40 frames per second
continuous guarranteed thruput.

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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