RE: [pygame] 3D engine ?

["Mike C. Fletcher" <mcfletch@home.com>]

Other likely accelerator points:
	normal generation and tessellation of rapidly changing geometry
	reading of binary file formats for multi-megabyte files
	subdivision surface LOD calculation? (seems likely)
	particle systems (at least those not amenable to Numeric)

As a note: culling and collision detection are pretty big in my want list :)
.

I actually use display arrays all through my code.  It's just that without
the little accelerators for some areas you spend a lot of time on
work-arounds to get decent speed.  I'd rather have accelerator functions and
these features available :) .

It might be possible to code the entire collision algo or an uber-flexible
particle system with a Numeric array where each object updates its item in
the array when it changes and you just zap through the whole array.  While
that's possible, little pieces of simple accelerator code in a utility
library are often more flexible and re-usable across projects (not to
mention easier to follow when reading the code).

Anyway, I think we're basically agreeing that Python is froody for most of
the code, but that certain hot-spots might need some clever hacking or C
code (if we include them).

Remember your towels,
Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pygame-users@seul.org [mailto:owner-pygame-users@seul.org]On
Behalf Of Tim Downs
Sent: September 7, 2001 02:04
To: pygame-users@seul.org
Subject: RE: [pygame] 3D engine ?


>As for C code, I would suggest that for any really useful API it will be
>necessary to have considerable C accelerators for the hot spots.  3-D
>graphics is too intensive to do everything in Python code.  Fallbacks to
>Python are fine, but aren't much use of the application runs at one frame
>per minute with them.

So I thought when writing a 3d object viewer in Python OpenGL.

However, when I started using Display Arrays, the speed shot up to almost
that of a C program.

The only problems I can see are complex modeling which
Display Arrays cannot be used for, culling, and collision detection.

However, if an engine doesn't do these, then Python code can be very
fast.

Timothy Downs
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