Merge Java3D and Xith3D?

[kevglass]

Of course the really wonderful thing about these open source projects is that if you don't like something or want something added that no one else seems to think is worth while you can always add it yourself and maintain a slight branch of source.

Delayed texture loading would seem to be out of the general focus of the folks maintaining Xith or JME. So why not just add it yourself? If you do it really nicely and don't impact the general use case then you'll probably find they'll happily add your changes to the core.

Isn't that what Open Source was always meant to be about? Feature development based on need, not waiting for someone else to come along and do it?

Kev

[princec]

I've got delayed texture loading and notification in SPGL (notice how Super Elvis' loading screen works)

The thing is it's an extremely unusual requirement in soft realtime graphics. If you need to display a model with a texture on it next frame, you can't really be showing a wireframe while the texture loads. You have to have it loaded and ready way in advance or you drop frames. You can either do it at a point when you're not having to display in realtime, or you can load bits on demand and hope you can get them inside a frame. That's just the way it is for soft realtime though, of which games is a subset.

Cas

[JeramieHicks]

Actually we just have a pre-loaded model as a placeholder for delayed models in transit, and we just use a flat grey texture for delayed textures in transit. No framerate impact... generally speaking, the placeholder content has a better framerate than the actual content. The entire delayed process works in less than a second or so, and we find that people accept the streaming nature of the system very readily... much more readily than waiting for a 2GB pre-game download to finish, for instance. They'd rather be up and playing, and then only download content as they first encounter it, than needing to install 2GB (ie, EverQuest) all at once for content they may never encounter in their playing experience. I tell ya, dialup people really really appreciate that. Not to mention that we can dynamically modify the universe on serverside and not incur a per-player patch penalty on the next login.

The only reason I asked the Xith devs first is because they already know the Xith source... and when it's the difference between one person doing it in 5 minutes, versus me taking 5 days just to understand the Xith code enough not to screw it up, I figure I could at least ask first.

As far as Aviatrix3D, it's not as advanced as our own in-house 3D engine, and like was said earlier, doesn't seem to have the ongoing development speed of Xith. I guess just any issue not directly related to making Quake games I'll just have to shut up about.

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[Yuri Vl. Gushchin]

Hi,

Delayed texture loading would seem to be out of the general focus of the folks maintaining Xith or JME.

Depends on how you see this. Now I am actively working on reducing memory requirements of Xith3D and want to release texture data after it defined as OpenGL texture (say, lazy texture). I think the same mechanism can be useful for delayed texture loading as well... but it cal also be implemented without any modification of Xith3D engine...

Yuri