Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/10/10/20:16:45
>Allegro does not make use of any of the hardware accelerated features offered
>by any 3D card.
Let's just say hardware developers aren't particularly
interested in helping what is commercially speaking a minority
community. And then, if you are someone like S3, you aren't very
interested in helping anyone at all :) At least that's what people have
told me!
>The 3D part of Allegro is not likely to be extended in the near future, but
>even for un-accelerated 3D, it's still a bit slow.
It's not that it is so slow, it's that it doesn't do what it
could. That is, it perspective corrects every pixel, I have heard people
say it only clips on a pixel level, though I doubt that, and as for
gouroud shading, I really don't know what's going on there, but it seems
to be accurate to more than a fixed point scheme would allow. Maybe it
is a brensham style maximum error thing, but I feel a fixed point scheme
might be faster. Not that I'm any kind of authority!
>You can try using another library such as Lib3D, Plush, Jaw3D, etc, and get it
>to draw the image to an Allegro bitmap (you would also have to tell the other
>library the height, width, and colourdepth of the bitmap, as it won't be
>familiar with Allegro's BITMAP struct). AFAIK, none of these support hardware
>accelerated 3D.
Just to say here, I am busy making a 3d library specifically for
Allegro - no 3d hardware support yet since I don't own any (except an S3
Virge, and I have a toolkit for that downloading now), but if anyone
wants to get together on this, just de-spam my e-mail address (the '_'s)
and say. It's not going badly, but I'll post an ANNOUNCEment when it
gets anywhere decent. Go to http://www.softysoft.home.ml.org and
download the gouroud man from the quickies section who I did in a half
hour using a 0.1a version of my code if you want.
>Are there any libraries out there for Dos/DJGPP that make use of hardware 3D
>acceleration, or are there any under development? When I get a 3D card of my
>own, I might experiment with writing a DJGPP library for it, and perhaps make
>it possible to easily add support for other cards as well as software-rendering
>(for when there's no 3D card).
Try MESA, it is OpenGL to all extents and purposes and so uses
3DFX if it can. I don't know any URL's or anything. It works with DJGPP,
but it is very unspecific and hard to figure out in my opinion. Anyway,
if you ever do get 3d accelerator code going, any chance of a look? :)
-Thomas
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