[lug] Local Open Source Project Leads/Managers

[Steve Houston]

Sorry I have taken so long to reply....

> "D. Stimits" <stimits at idcomm.com> wrote:
>
>
> I have an interest in a game project, which is currently under
> discussion of redesign. I recently converted old C code to a C++
> version, with the intent of redesigning it in parts, which is turning
> out to be slow. But the short explanation is that there is interest in
> creating an OpenGL version and starting with a client and server that
> use some of the old ideas, but not much of the original code.
> http://www.battlefieldlinux.com

Cool... that's an interesting project.

> Unfortunately, the web page is difficult to read; my Netscape shows the
> fonts as tiny and not very good resolution, even though I've tried to
> force both fixed and variable width fonts to 24 point (I'd estimate that
> http://www.3dwm.org/frameset.html is showing up at approximately the
> same size as a 6 point font, and lots of aliasing). Basically, some of
> the web pages are not readable (I'd have to do a copy and paste to vi or
> something to see what it says). Contrary to all the above whining, I am
> able to read the php pages, which apparently use a different font (it's
> still small, but I can read most of it).

I've let our webmaster know about the problems you had and he'll try and
address them shortly.

> What I am curious about is that this says it is not a window manager.
> But it appears it requires an X11 server in the background. 

Currently X11 is required for 2 reasons:

1) OpenGL acceleration. Essentially, to get good OpenGL driver support
you have to be running XFree86 4.0 with DRI. We plan to move away X
(mainly because of it's large memory/resource requirements and our
interest in wearable computers), which will probably involve SDL or GGI.
Currently though, these don't offer the same level of hardware
acceleration as X/DRI.

2) Support for regular 2D applications. This is achieved by running X11
(either locally or remotely) and displaying the X desktop in our 3D
environment using VNC. You can an example of this on the screenshots
page.

> Is it
> possible to run all the regular applications in this environment? 

Yep :)

> Can
> something like the gnome ORB and security methods still be used?

We aren't using ORBit (which is what gnome uses), instead we use
omniORB. We haven't looked at security too much so far, we are still in
the initial stages of building the UI. Can you give an example of what
you are proposing?

> Requirements show the need for cavelib to be installed, but not
> multiprocessor...I happen to run a couple of SMP machines, I'm curious
> if the 3dwm works well with SMP?

Hmmm, that shouldn't be in the requirements. Where did you see that, I'd
like to fix it. You only need cavelib if you are actually running in a
CAVE. 

We haven't done any testing on an SMP system, however I believe it will
beneficial. 3dwm uses a threaded client/server architecture. The server
is responsible for rendering the 3D environment and the client(s) are
responsible for generating the world content (building the scene graph).
I think this should scale nicely on multiple CPUs.

> I guess my main problem with trying this all out is that cavelib appears
> to be commercial only.

Our mistake, it will run fine without cavelib.

Regards,
Steve.