Sharon Clay (src++at++rose)
Wed, 17 Dec 1997 13:17:12 -0800
Thanx for raising your Q's - hopefully if we keep talking about this things
will be clearer to you and the exercise is good for us to make sure we know
what we are doing and that it is really in the form that will meet
peoples needs.
The current efforts are answers to the "old" questions...
o Why aren't Performer and Inventor the same toolkit
o Why can't Performer and Inventor at least work together in one app
o Why can't IL, Performer, and Inventor work together in one app
o Why can't Inventor be MP
o How do we get Performer on an open platform
o Is Performer just for Vis Sim? What about other markets?
o Just how big is Performer going to get?
So, we are on our way to an open plaform that will present a common
model for a scene graph and multiprocessing. This will enable
toolkits to work together, and provide a common hook-up point for loaders.
The higher level toolkits will be just that - toolkits focusing on special
support or special features instead of having to provide redundantly the
full solution. Where it makes sense for these toolkits to be open,
they certainly will be. Certainly much of the current toolkits will move
directly into the scene graph layer. With some features that require special SGI
hw support, it makes sense that the feature be expressable in the scene graph, but
probably not reasonable to expect "faked" support for some of those high end
features on other platforms but rather "substituted" features wherever possible
(eg. clipmapping vs low-res texture and/or texture paging).
Each of our current toolkits embodies some hard learned lessons that we plan on
not forgetting:
Inventor and UI, extensibility, open, and fast prototyping
Performer and all-platform support (O2->8 pipe iR monster),
fast rendering, run-time optimization and MP
IL and multi-platform chained hw-accelerated image processing
Optimizer and MP run-time simplification
Cosmo3D - vrml and and our first shot at an open scene graph platform
It is definitely hard to do it all in one which is why we didn't do it
originally and trying to be careful about how we go about it now.
All of the current toolkits will continue but in new forms that will look
somewhat different than their past as necessary to work with the new model.
Now, on Performer
Performer 2.2 has just released (OK - there it is, separate announcement email
will follow) so you can be sure that Performer 2.2 will be supported for
quite some time. Performer2.2 includes upgrade compat bug-fix libs
for 2.0 and 2.1! Performer also includes support for features in IRIX 6.5,
as well as still supporting 6.2, and still supporting IRIS GL on older
IRIS GL native platforms.
If you need to do high-end or real-time graphics development on SGI now, you
should use Performer 2.2 and comfortable with the fact that we will support you
to success.
There will be a Performer 3.0 but that will be based on the new unified
scene graph architecture. It will take us awhile to get _all_ of the 2.2 features
to the new architecture so expect it to roll out in pieces and there will be
changes/improvements (or else what is the point?). There will be porting involved.
The scene graph API is pretty simillar to Performer and Cosmo3D as those things
are the basis for it. The real porting effort we expect will be in the change
of multiprocessing model to a shared address space MP (as opposed to fork).
We have been waiting for awhile for the right time to make this switch...
Use explicitly allocated per-process shared memory and don't rely on static
variables for per-process memory and your port will be a lot easier.
Your port to the future scene graph layer will be a LOT easier
comming from Performer than from a pure unknown OpenGL app.
Our ability to help you (us includes customer support and the Developer's Program)
will also be a lot greater if you are comming from a basis that we all
understand. We'll also try to provide porting tools from our current toolkits
to help with the basic API changes.
If you have to do open development NOW for very near-term deployment, talk
to us - we'd like folks to be able to move smoothly to the scene graph
architecture.
Hopefully that is a start and helps clarify some things.
Always at your service,
src.
--
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Sharon Rose Clay (Fischler) - Silicon Graphics, Advanced Systems Dev.
src++at++sgi.com (650) 933 - 1002 FAX: (650) 965 - 2658 MS 8U-590
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