MC & OpenGL (update)

[jbv]

Hi again,

I'm afraid there's a little confusion in the word "implementation".
The only purpose of the demo I put online was to show that
realtime communication between MC and openGL was possible,
as well as displaying the rendered image in an MC img control.

Of course the final purpose is to have everything scriptable,
including 3D objects, textures they use and how they interact...

My question concerned mainly : HOW to do that in MetaTalk ?
A large set of functions and properties should be added to the
the language of course, but HOW should it be structured ?
As long as there's only a couple of textured spheres or cubes
floating around, that's not too complicated...
But what about a particule system made of metaballs bouncing
around according to a complex math function (for instance) ?

I'm presently working on a 3D sound processing app that would
display partials & spectrum of sounds in 3D (from Csound files),
and allow users to manipulate these data (first with the mouse and
various tools, and in the end with a data glove) like clay, and then
re-synthesise the sound.
So at every step of this work I try to figure out what would be the
best (read: more ergonomic / intuitive / productive) way to script it
in MT.
And sadly, it appears that coding it in C as an external with simple
calls from a MC scripts remains the most powerful & flexible way
to do... By powerful I mean : giving access to all openGL features.

>
>
> My suggestions would include a good look at Director and the 3D Lingo
> terminology and then to take the core of this and add something
> "special".

I had a look at 3D Lingo (I dropped Director around version 4, andit made
me feel strange to go back to this crappy sprite stuff)...
Please don't take it personal, but it's the typical example of what
I'd like to avoid...

>
>
> It's a vague suggestion, and I'm not up fully on the technical side -
> but the frustration I had then was the lack of ability to dynamically
> create a world. So I'd like to ba able to have an interface which would
> allow me to stream / add to / delete from / morph the OpenGL content -
> not just move around and interact with precreated environments.

This is closer to what I had in mind...

> Bringing up the open source theme again - the most exciting thing by far
> in the 3D realm from my point of view would be to take the Open Source
> code from the largest online 3D community - Blender and be able to use
> both the authoring tools and real-time engine to create and control 3D
> objects within the MC environment.

is Blender cross-platform ?

>
>
> It uses Python at the moment as a scripting language, and you could look
> at how this is implemented. From my view at the time it would make a
> more valuable product to use MC as a backend scripting language for a 3D
> front end than to play 3D windows within an MC front end?
>

Any useful link for that ?

Thanks,
JB