Archives April 2009

So with a fairly extensive set of Cython wrappers, running a fairly large, heavy VRML world with transparencies and all the rest, I see a noticeable, but modest, speedup.

The world I'm testing on goes from ~12.8fps (avg) to 15.5fps (avg), that's a nice 20% speedup.  On average OpenGLContext now spends around 20% of rendering ...

I've been writing accelerator modules for PyOpenGL for the last two days.  I think I've got to a reasonably comfortable point.  I've got a Numpy FormatHandler and an ArrayDatatype written.  With some judicious use of cdef'd typed self variables there's a lot of overhead eliminated from the wrapper operation.  To make it really fast, however, ...

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? ...