Re: [Chicken-users] 3D games in Chicken

[Shawn Rutledge]

>  I've thought about binding Chicken to various 3D engines.  I'm inclined to
> view this as a waste of time, though.  Every 3D engine out there will have
> its own stupid C++ calls for manipulating the scene graph, and really,
> that's something you'd rather be doing with Scheme proper.  Having to ape
> other languages' baloney high level data structures just strikes me as
> really really tacky and counterproductive.  I'm thinking it is better to
> implement a 3D engine almost from scratch.  In practice, that means from
> scratch.

Yes I agree that would be nice, but since you'd want to take as much
advantage as possible of hardware acceleration, how can you avoid the
OpenGL API, for the sake of portability?

My goal is not a game, but to mess around with next-generation GUI
ideas.  I don't even need 3D very badly to do that, but I figure the
trend is that 3D hardware acceleration is taking over, and the leading
2D GUI systems (OS X, Vista and xegl) are taking advantage of it, not
to mention the 3D ones like Looking Glass.  Unfortunately I don't have
experience with OpenGL, so I'm going to have to learn, I guess.

I got all excited a few months ago when I discovered the openGL egg
but then was disappointed when I saw how incomplete it was for my
purposes, and how much real work all those bindings are still going to
be to finish implementing, and how painful it is to use a 3D API for
doing mostly 2D work.

I am also interested in having my GUI system be portable to PDAs etc;
realistically by the time I have done something useful, PDAs and
phones and such will probably all have 3D hardware, but in the mean
time there are a couple of software-only openGL implementations, like
this one which does have some hardware acceleration on XScale
processors:

http://studierstube.icg.tu-graz.ac.at/klimt/

So I think a 3D binding which is based on OpenGL is probably going to
have a very long life.

I'm not much of a gamer, but have enjoyed Civ and SimCity in the past,
and agree that's probably a very good game genre to try to do in
Scheme.