Blender and gallium on haiku

I agree, apart from a reference standpoint (and perhaps very simple desktop compositing) I see little use of software rendering since it will always (with or without llvm recompiling of gpu shaders) be too slow in practice. A Haiku code drive for Gallium would probably yield alot of interest (worked for Aros) but obviously someone must be able/have time to actually pick up the gauntlet.

Tunestone, I done the VegaStrike port using GLUT..

If I post here, you could test in the latest build?

Seems that my pc is not recognizing the resolution modes ...

the binaries is about 27MB

but you should download game data (430 mb)

amd developerzone has tons of hardware info.

How important is (open)GL to 3D software?

Looking at the AGC demos I have to wonder if a simplified GL or other API could be used write usable 3D programs? Looking at OpenGL it seems to have a ton of features that most people don't need.

re Blender and OpenGL. From the Blender FAQ it says you can get up to 4X speedup when using Blender with a supported video card and OpenGL. However, you could also get a 4X speedup running Blender with a quad processer. So the question is can you run Blender without OpenGL??

Feel free to argue all you want :-) I would argue that 3D apps and Office productivity are for very different sets of users. There are many Haiku users who would rather tinker with 3D models than write a book report in a Word clone. Not that Office apps aren't important, they are. But they address different sets of users.

It was not the LLVM-optimized software pipe renderer, but the non-LLVM softpipe renderer, which was and will probably always be slower than the hand-optimized Mesa software renderer you already have builtin in Haiku.

You miss nothing here really, except the ability to experience it yourself ;-)

Adrian has already posted some comments on the haiku-development mailing list. It seems he's trying to reuse a former Linux Kernel Library haiku port to see if it could ease porting DRM and heavily Linuxy gallium drivers code.

Nobody can today say how far this path will goes or even if it will.

Sorry to break it, but no: there is no point for such task until we have at least some 3D hardware acceleration working. :-)

Being there too, and done, well, not enough as I would want to improve that situation.

Oh right yeah that makes sense, i assumed that Softpipe and LLVM where one in the same. Looks like there is a lot of work to be done before we see hardware acceleration up and running globally in haiku (lets hope it won't take another 10 years, I'm running out of decades)

Theres hardly any documentation of how developers hand utilize mesa in certain 3d centric applications is there? I have an app that I'm working on that would benefit from OpenGL support but am not really sure where to start with it.

I would so love if Haiku inc could find a stable revenue stream and just pump money for development into this project, Haiku no doubt has a lot of potential and now with a much more eco system theres less chance for it to be muscled out of the market by the bigger punters like BeOS was. God i miss Be inc.

Many OpenGL portable/demos applications are using GLUT API to abstract from the host graphical system. Haiku has GLUT support built-in too (in libGL.so), so you should be able to port many of these programs to Haiku.

The most famous is glgears.

It's even available as a test program in Haiku source tree:
http://dev.haiku-os.org/browser/haiku/trunk/src/tests/kits/opengl/demos/...

We have a current mesa port ... Alexander von Gluck aka kallisti5 is the man that does most of the Mesa work. Search for his posts on the mailing lists. Currently mesa is being refactored to reduce the ammount of code Haiku has to maintain. Also some of the Haiku code is maintained in Mesa itself these days.

Searching for his real name on the mainling list seems to turn up the most results.

We already have some Gallium support through LLVMpipe... which can be alot faster than the old software renderer since it multi-threads better. I don't remember if it is enabled by default. That said it is still a CPU based renderer and we don't have hardware 3d support yet.