Re: The future of Performer

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Angus Dorbie (dorbie++at++sgi.com)
Tue, 23 Jun 1998 12:28:01 -0700

Tagore D. Smith wrote:
>
> Hi, I was hoping that someone on the performer team might be willing to
> comment on some possible future developments of the API.
> I am currently writing an application to be used as a tool for the
> Computer Vision Lab at the University of Massachusetts. It will be used to
> train an interactive terrain classifier. The datasets are large, and the
> application requires fast increamental texture updates, so Performer is
> pretty much the only API that will really do what we want; we need
> facilities like clipmapping and the pfASD node.

For these features you'll need Performer.

> The program will be useful as an in-house development tool, but we
> would really like to be able to share it with the end-users of the
> classification system. We have an Onyx iR; forestry services and
> environmental organizations in the third world won't.
> From what I hear, SGI is at least thinking about making NT
> workstations. What I am wondering is if there are any plans to port
> Performer to NT. I know that NT is not as suitable as IRIX for the sorts
> of applications that Performer is most commonly used for, and that the
> number of possible configurations for NT workstations would makee this
> difficult, but it would be nice to see.

Performer won't be available on NT.

Fahrenheight Scene Graph will be the cross platform Performer like API
but stuff like ASD and CLIP mapping probably won't be in FSG initially.

FSG won't be around until for a while yet so you'd be better stickin
with Performer for now. You'll be able to go NT with FSG after a port
but you may have to implement some more stuff of your own or lose ASD
and texture paging.

Performer with ASD is still supported on our systems, including O2
and OCTANE.

Cheers,Angus.

-- 
"Only the mediocre are always at their best." -- Jean Giraudoux 


For advanced 3D graphics Performer + OpenGL based examples and tutors:
http://www.dorbie.com/
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