How to do 3D graphics development on the Amiga?

[EntilZha]

know AMIGA may not have a DirectX 3D type enviroment, but If a game uses the latest 3D and your card can't do it, well it won't look as good and will run slowere. No matter how efficant the OS is.

Believe me, I share your concerns. And believe me, I don't share this opinion about the "uselessness" of powerful 3D hardware.

Development in that direction is on it's way, but I can't talk about this right now. If it works out, though, there'll be an optimal solution for the Amiga in terms of 3D graphics, at least for ATI cards, and maybe for others as well.

[EntilZha]

It should be *part* of the OS.

Initially, this was the only part of the OS we would be doing, until fate (and other factors) decided otherwise ;-)

[EntilZha]

I for one would rather have all printer/usb/etc stuff done before 3D things.

Yes, but luckiy, those aren't done by me  :-D

[EntilZha]

Yeah, that closed source, in-house developemnt only, non-standard low-level library,

You mean glide ? Or DirectX ? (SCNR)

Mesa is dead on Amiga, while it's alive and kicking on other systems.

LOL! Mesa is a tremendous piece of software, but it's state management sucks dead hamsters through a garden hose. Compare the perfomrmance of Linux and Windows on the same platform, with any official driver (nVidia or ATI).

o see where the competition is going... light years ahead.

Nobody is denying that... but then, if you don't start, you never get anywhere... your stance seems to be to stick your head into the sand and surrender to "the evil empire" ?

"super puper 3dapi"?!? have a look at this:

or www.opengl.org ?  :-D

[EntilZha]

it was just a bit of sarcasm about the Warp3D/Amithlon (both software renderer and Voodoo driver) licensing issues.

Yeah, I know that was a bit of a controversy, but there was more behind it than really hit the surface... suffice to say that if some people hadn't been such d*ckheads, it would have gone better...

But, if you did so to avoid splitting the community (again no offence intended), sadly (or fortunately?) the effect on me (and maybe some others?) was that I suddenly jumped on the MorphOS train.

Why that ? Do you really think the Amithlon/Warp3D situation was our fault ? Fact is that it wasn't. We offered to licencse Warp3D to Amithlon, even for half the price (because we were told that "the hardware we support is utterly outdated on the PC platfomr"). After we offered that, we never got a reply. Later on, certain people said in public that we didn't want to license it.

So bottom line, somebody (not us) lied in public about this. I'm sorry if that drove you away...

I'm satisfied with DRI and nVidia drivers performance on Linux

Well, I'm not. I have an ATI Radeon 8500 and I'm using the latest ATI driver (tainting my kernel, but that's another story :-D) and the performance is way below what Windows can offer... I would accept some percent, but not factors (it's about two to three times slower on Linux).

more afraid to compare the best Amiga performance (Permedia2?) to the worst Linux x86 software renderer (given a decent processor)

Well, the last tests I did on my AmigaOne did show that it was much faster in software rendering than a similar clocked x86... about 80 % faster, and that's without any Assembler in the PPC version.. But I get your point...

Anyway at this stage I'm much more concerned (and dreamy) about some way to get a Makefile, wich works on BOTH Linux and Cygwin to compile on AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS, all without having to use such a blind violence to GLU tesselators

Hear, hear :-(

I just want some people to get real, and realize that they're talking about "rendering" (e.g. how good Lightwave was, let's make a petition to have it again (!) etc.), while other platform are approaching same visual quality in realtime.

Well, the good part about modern 3D graphics is that most of the performance isn't tied to the CPU anymore... in fact, we're approaching a level where most of the rendering is done on the graphics card, and not the CPU anymore... So theoretically, it's possible to catch up there, although, of course, you're probably always behind when you're trying to compete with Windows... Well, we're working on it, that's all I can say...

[EntilZha]

I have never tried StormMESA in any way shape or form. I could give it a shot tho

Take care, it's based on Mesa 3.0 (IIRC), and utterly outdated...

[EntilZha]

I understand the delay, and the need to complete the OS, but I don't understand the lack of a concrete vision and story for 3D on the Amiga. Saying that such and such API is possibly coming out, and not knowing what it actually is capable of and how it works, is not what I'm talking about.

The vision is clear: OpenGL *will* be in. Possibily, there'll be another API, but you can definitely count on OpenGL.

[EntilZha]

We need people like yourself plugging the AMIGA product, people who do know what they are talking about.

Thanks. I don't hear that a lot, most poeple here will tell you otherwise  :-D

[EntilZha]

Count on OpenGL? I thought it was a rendering API, not an abbacus!

Naw, a simple stencil buffer operation can count anything :-D

PS:I guess it must be Hyperions dinner time?

Yep, just finished (which means I should get back to work ;-))