Steve Baker (steve++at++mred.hti.com)
Wed, 4 Jan 95 08:25:19 -0600
Given that; I believe that the priority for the Performer team should
always be to implement things that are hard or impossible to do without their
help. In the case of character strings versus billboards there is already a
simple mechanism to get character strings into Performer (I do it all the time)
provided you have a reasonable modeller (eg MultiGen or DWB). Model each
letter of the alphabet as a separate object, then instance each object as needed
to make up a string - you could either do this by hand inside your modeller,
or write a simple subroutine to do it inside Performer. In fact, MultiGen (at least)
already has a couple of fonts modelled this way and a routine to let you
just type text in. (Check out the 'T' icon in the middle of the icon bar).
On the other hand, to do good billboards is pretty nasty - particularly if
you have multiple channels - all looking from different directions with
various channel offsets. Point-rotate billboards need some fairly hairy maths
and there is no easy way to get the culling right if you 'do it yourself'.
This is a clear case where we should let the Performer team do the difficult
bits.
Finally - why pick text as the thing that Performer should generate automatically?
I would personally prefer that they generate aircraft models automatically....
I want:
pfAirplane("Boing 747-700"); /* ;-) */
Thanks for your indulgance - End-of-flame.
Steve Baker.
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Steve Baker
Hughes Training Inc.
2200 Arlington Downs Road
Arlington, Texas.
TX 76005-6171
steve++at++mred.hti.com (Email)
817-695-2478 (Voice)
817-695-2308 (Alt.voice)
817-695-2555 (Fax)
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