Scientific computing with D

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 10:54 AM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Chad J
> <gamerchad at __spam.is.bad__gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Still, most of us have pretty decent graphics hardware on our desks
>>> these days.  It's sad that we still can't really use it to get decent
>>> quality 2D graphics.  So really I think the future is not AGG but some
>>> clever shaders to do AA with graphics hardware.  I think DX10 class
>>> hardware opens up new possibilities here.  And probably the distant
>>> distant future is back to just brute force 256x oversampling :-)
>>>
>>> --bb
>>
>> Interesting.
>>
>> So AGG is not dead and that looks like it'd be a nice project.  A high
>> quality software rendering SVG lib complementing a GL project.
>>
>> It would also be neat to see shaders/GPGPU stuff applied to an SVG
>> renderer.  Not just for the AA but doing all of the filters quickly too
>> would be great.
>>
>> Right now though I'm just trying to write a reference render path
>> without shaders or anything--something that even the really old hardware
>> will run.  I think I might require a stencil buffer.  Oh dear.
>> Hopefully this also makes porting to portable devices easier.
>> Eventually shader/GPGPU trickery can be applied to optimize and add
>> awesome, though it's probably not worth enough to me personally.  I'd
>> happily watch other people do it though :)
>
> You may know about these things already but...
>
> The two things I had my eyes on when I was last looking into 2D
> rendering were Amanith (www.amanith.org) and OpenVG
> (http://www.khronos.org/openvg/)
>
> It looks like Amanith has morphed into a commercial OpenVG
> implementation... hmm I think it was open source (GPL?) for a while.
> It was original just meant to be a nice 2D rendering lib on top of
> OpenGL.
>
> There's also the "glitz" backend for Cairo, though I think it's also a
> little dead.  It wasn't really functional last I checked.  And Cairo
> wasn't very Windows-friendly then either.

Oh, another one worth checking out is Thatcher Ulrich's GameSWF.  It's
very open and free code, so its a good reference for robust
triangulation and such.  http://tulrich.com/geekstuff/gameswf.html

Robust triangulation is pretty hard, actually.  So I would encourage
you to try to reuse something that already exists like Thatcher
Ulrich's code.  Or taking the MESA version of GLUTess and refactoring
it till its API doesn't suck.   In fact I think I Thatcher said over
on the gdalgorithms mailing list that if he had known about the open
Mesa implementation of GLU Tess he would have hacked on that instead
of rolling his own triangulator.   And according to some of the other
old-timers on gdalgorithms list, GLU tess is the only freely available
triangulator out there that isn't a fragile piece of junk.

--bb