Sharon Clay (src++at++rose.engr.sgi.com)
Sat, 20 Sep 1997 12:52:52 -0700
Definitey not! It is good to ask the key questions - much better than
guessing! But I think people were leaving this for me to answer and I got
behind on the list for a couple of days (terribly sorry) and am
doing some catchup now.
->
->Hello,
->
->When Performer 2.2 will be available ?
When:
So, good question because our Dev. Forum slides on our web page
say "Summer '97" and even by California standards, we are stretching
summer a bit. The short answer is we think we are basically done and are
working on cleaning up and fixing nits we broke along the way, the book,
sample code, and a couple of last things that some of our developers
requested to support them. Our schedule has us now releasing
mid-November. This will also enable us to get our
released eoe into IRIX 6.5.
Why:
We stretched it out a bit for solid virtual clipmaping support.
For those new or non-iR centric, clipmapping is a way of virtualizing
texture memory so that we can handle textures that are much larger
than texture memory seemlessly (discussed with nice pictures in those
Dev Forum slides now on our web page). Clipmapping in our 2.1 release
supported textures up to 32Kx32K texels. However, using some additional
tricks (actually a bunch because as this was our first hw implementation of
climapping as well there were a lot of rough edges) we could do textures of
size 8Mx8M texels! "Virtual Cliptextures" are those greater than the
original 32Kx32K cliptextures that is what the basic iR addressing hardware
supports. Originally we thought we might go out with an intermediate
release that supported virtual cliptextures but not all the way to the limit,
and make future improvements later. Then we discovered that because of some
of those rough edges, our original API and model for clipmapping wasn't going
to get us there. It also seemed clear that most everyone using clipmapping
intended to "go virtual". Rather than keep changing API and model, we decided
to hold off and get the model right and now we have it all in use
in real applications. We now have a platform which we can both release and
make underlying improvements as necessary in the future.
We took additional advantage of the extra time to make some
significant additional improvements to other parts of the library, such
as ASD (active surface definition geometry) and pfFluxes - a great improvement
over cycle buffers for doing asynchronous generation of vertices, full pfGeoSets
(and anything else). We have also been working on examples/support of the
digital media libraries, better process control, and other things that are
in IRIX 6.5.
What Hw is supported:
Performer 2.2 will be an all-platform release, supporting anything
that runs IRIX 6.2 or later.
Features that have not required hardware support, such as
ASD, Fluxes, better process control work for all flavors.
IRIS GL is included for compatibility and is only supported on IRIS GL
native graphics platforms (RE, Indy, Extreme).
Clipmapping and the layered range-based fog which require significant
hardware support and would be unusably slow/ugly without it
are not supported in IRIS GL or on non-iR graphics platforms.
We are walking the fine line between timing and proper support
of the features we are releasing. Your feedback in this process
is tremendously valuable in helping us make the proper tradeoffs
in our efforts to deliver new innovations in an easy-to use form
and good and timely service and support.
->
->Thank you
I hope this clarifies things and answers your questions.
Thank you!
src.
--
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Sharon Rose Clay (Fischler) - Silicon Graphics, Advanced Systems Dev.
src++at++sgi.com (415) 933 - 1002 FAX: (415) 965 - 2658 MS 8U-590
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