Graphics Library for D
Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>
Ola Fosheim Grøstad" <ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>
Wed Jan 8 04:26:56 PST 2014
On Wednesday, 8 January 2014 at 11:34:53 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Rendering to a memory buffer to generate png images is a
> legitimate use case. If Phobos has a graphics API, I would
> expect that to be supported even when no gpu is present.
Yes, this is true, but that was not the goal stated at the start
of the thread. The linked framework is a wrapper for a hodge
podge of graphics technologies that target real time graphics (an
internal framework that was developed to do graphics for
advertising I think).
A generic non-real-time graphics API that is capable of
generating PDF, SVG and PNG would be quite useful in web-services
for instance. But then it should be based on the graphics model
that can be represented efficiently in PDF and SVG.
However, if you want interactive graphics, you enter a different
domain. An engine that assumes that all geometry change for each
frame is quite different from an engine that assumes that most
graphics do not change beyond simple affine transforms.
If you decide that most surface do not change (beyond affine
transforms) and want a portable graphics solution, you either
write your own compositor (in D) on top of the common GPU model,
or you use an engine which provides a hidden compositor (like
SVG, and even Flash).
With a compositor you can let your "non real time" graphics API
to write to surfaces that are used by that compositor. Thus, the
real time requirements for graphic primitives are much lower. But
it is more work for the programmer than using a high level
retained mode engine such as SVG.
However the argument against shaders/GPU does not hold, I think.
Using simple shaders (with your own restricted syntax) does not
require a GPU. If you can parse it at compile time you should be
able to generate D code for it, and you should be able to
generate code for GL/DX at runtime quite easily (probably a few
days of work).
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