[news.eclipse.gef3d] Re: Lighting

[Miles Parker <milesparker@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 2009-06-02 16:20:01 -0700, Kristian Duske 
<kristian.duske@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

> Hi Miles,
>
> > In my continuing exploration I'm trying to figure out how to get 
> > lightening to work to add apparant depth to the solid cubes.. I've 
> > found some gl examples such as..
> >
> > http://www.videotutorialsrock.com/opengl_tutorial/lighting/text.php
> >
> > But the glLightfv method doesn't appear to be part of Graphics3D. Is 
> > thi possilbe to do right now?
>
> No, not right now. We haven't added any support for lighting whatsoever 
> because we didn't see how it was neccessary for diagram editors, which 
> is our main concern ;-).

Right, understood. Still, even with diagrams, you may have shapes such 
as handles or complex solids that could benefit from a greater sense of 
depth.

> If it's just a matter of adding methods to Graphics3D, I don't see why 
> we couldn't do it though. Jens, what do you think?
>
> By the way: Miles, if I understand correctly what you're trying to do, 
> you're not interested in editing support for your diagrams, right? This 
> is only for visualization of agent systems?

That's quite true in general. However, I use GEF extensivly (as well as 
Draw2D) because it does such a good job of managing the update of agent 
hierarchies and it doesn't appear to have a heavy performance hit. 
(Probably more memory than needed though.) I could imagine using 
editing support at some point but that would be almost incidental. But 
typically I'm wanting to update everything at once with as little 
performance hit as possible, and (again, typically) the quickest option 
would often be rerendering everything. In contrast to Draw2D my sense 
is that all of the figures are rebuilt if they move anyway..