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Subject: 
Re: Hey everyone stop and check this new LDVIEW like app
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Sat, 9 Feb 2002 09:08:01 GMT
Viewed: 
491 times
  
Sproaticus wrote:

In lugnet.cad, Kyle McDonald writes:

Like all Java stuff... It's getting faster all the time. J3d 1.3 is
much better.


Yah, I acknowledge that readily.  But I'm still going to assert that it's
not yet ready for prime time.  ;-)


I gues that depend son your definition of primetime :)


Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of Java.  My dream job is to get paid
again for rolling Swing GUIs!  :-9  But my experiences with Java3D (even
1.3, checked it out last week, trying to uninstall it even as we speak) has
been disappointing when there's no hardware acceleration.

You used to get paid for that? Cool. ;^)


Sure I read it.  I've also installed Java3D, and run the examples, and
modified a few to change the thread priority.  Its performance is still
sluggish.

My box isn't a speed demon, but it's no slouch either.  I'm running a K6-500
with 192 Mb of RAM...and no 3D accelerator card.  The only other machine I
have to test it on is a 1.4GHz P4 with 512 Mb of RAM and some GeForce
something-or-other video card -- so of course it'll run fast on that.



I'm not much better off. I've got a P3-600 in my laptop, but it's got
only some 2.5MB trident dumb video chip. No 3D here either. I've only
got 128MB - that does get tight when running Win2K, NetBeans and trying
to run my J3D app on top of that. But If I take NetBeans out of the
picture it's not that bad.

I know my code is still pretty ugly and there is plenty of room for
optimizations. So I'm hoping it will get better and better.


But I suspect that Java3D is better geared towards a smallish number of flat
surfaces with bitmap textures and nifty alpha blending (a la most 3d video
games today) and not so good with very-largish numbers of small polygons
(80% of which have this nasty habit of overlapping).  Unfortunately, LDraw
fits squarely in the latter category.  Witness the unusually high memory
requirements and rendering times for even medium-sized LDraw models.


Smallish? I'll admit that most people make heavy use of textures, but
most of the numbers I hear on the Java3d-interest list are like 20K to
1 million triangles...

It's a scenegraph architecture mainly built right on OpenGL. OpenGL does
nearly all the hardwork. I can't imagine it will have much more trouble
with a large number of triangles than OGL does.


And yet, it's not that difficult to optimize a renderer for DAT viewing
(assuming you're writing the renderer).  So clearly, there's a disparity there.


Yes well... I've run into this already. Because of the closedness of
the Scenegraph architecture in J3D it's tough to do the conditional
lines the .DAT format uses. I have a few ideas, so while I haven't even
attempted it yet, I haven't given up either.


I think Java3D has potential to be useful for LDraw stuff *eventually*, but
not just right now, especially not on medium-rate systems like mine.



Yes, because of it's dependence/use of OpenGl (and Direct3D on Win)
it does make good use of any HW accel you may have. I don't have any
though, so hopefully any App I develop will work good on everyone
else's machines ;)



It is also designed to yield the CPU to what ever else needs it.
Will it use 100% of the CPU if nothing else is waiting? yes.
What's wrong with that? As soon as some other thread as something
to do the frame rate slows, and the other threads run. It's
pretty flexible. (it's kinda like being 'nice'd in UNIX.)


Well, great and flexible on true operating systems, e.g. Win NT where things
actually multitask, but not so hot on the 16-bit versions of Windows like
this deadbeat Win98-thingy on my laptop.  (1)  Once it gets 100% of my
processer, it refuses to give it up.  Or, like my friend observed, "That
processer ain't pegged, it's nailed right to the freaking wall!"  :-,


Well, It *is* kinda like a busy loop. :) but that's kinda the point.

I do use it on Win2k so maybe I'm not getting the full effect ;)



1.  Just a bit of pent-up-frustration angst there; I'd be running Win2k if
there were drivers for this box...


Been there Done that. That's why I made sure to get 2K on this machine
from the get go.

Have a good night!

-Kyle





--
                                    _
-------------------------------ooO( )Ooo-------------------------------
Kyle J. McDonald                 (o o)
                                  |||||

                                  \\\//
                                  (o o)            kmcdonald@BigFoot.COM
-------------------------------ooO(_)Ooo-------------------------------



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Hey everyone stop and check this new LDVIEW like app
 
(...) Yah, I acknowledge that readily. But I'm still going to assert that it's not yet ready for prime time. ;-) Don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of Java. My dream job is to get paid again for rolling Swing GUIs! :-9 But my experiences with (...) (23 years ago, 9-Feb-02, to lugnet.cad)

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