Archives week 16 of 2009

Seems that once again I've lost suspend with an Ubuntu update.  Was working perfectly well with Intrepid, but Jaunty just gives me the old, familiar black screen on resume.  Some day this silly laptop will resume properly out-of-box, but today is not that day.

OpenGLContext is currently using GLU quadrics to render the various VMRL quadric primitives.  There's no particular reason to do so other than it was easy and simple to implement.  I've just written up some code to generate two VBO-compatible arrays that render a sphere with a given angular resolution as a single glDrawElements call (once ...

So yes, apparently the ARB listens when its remaining community screams.  This extension (as Lorenzo points out) has been promised to be supported by nVidia on all of its planned 3.x cards and it effectively "undoes" the deprecation of the legacy APIs in OpenGL 3.1.  So you can likely get away with not rewriting, as ...

I wrote a silly little profiler module yesterday (that is, an actual profiler, not a profile viewer).  It's currently a Python-coded profiler, so pretty much useless, but it was very fun to write :) .  It captures the same basic data as cProfile (that is, it does run-time compression of the data-set rather than logging ...

I'm a happy Eric4 user.  I use very little of the "IDE" functionality, other than the project browser and source-code editor.  I am, however, very happy with just that.  I remove the rest of the windows and have a nice clean environment for coding that is snappy and has all the key-bindings I've worn into ...

Headed downtown yesterday to check out World Plone Day (Toronto).  Had an interesting discussion with a gentleman I've met before who works in a non-profit that does local-driven training programs where they use Plone to manage their (large) community that is, in essence, a huge tree of conversations/blogs that may need to propagate up to ...

Opaque, transparent and select (with colours, not select mode) rendering are now all working in the new renderer.  That was more than I was expecting to get done today.  I should likely work on occlusion/frustum queries next (should be fairly easy, Shapes already have queries to check against the frustum and/or do occlusion queries).  The ...

You often want to be able to calculate the eye-space coordinate of a given model-space coordinate. One of the most common reasons is to calculate the distance to a given object from the camera (depth in the scene) so that you can do sorting of the scenegraph.

Why would you want to sort a scenegraph? ...

There's a Toronto event as part of World Plone Day that I'm intending to attend (free registration is available off that link).  Interesting to see the Toronto Plone group organizing something like this.  They also have regular meetings for those who are aren't able to attend the WPD day-time event.

Sometimes after a decade or so of working with a technology you become so accustomed to the low-level operation you just stop thinking about how it actually works.  Writing the "legacy free" version of OpenGLContext is making me think again about how the whole edifice of computer graphics works.

Take, for example, the "normal matrix". ...