Re: cross-platform scenegraph?

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Angus Dorbie (dorbie++at++sgi.com)
Thu, 05 Aug 1999 11:19:57 -0700

Kent Watsen wrote:
>
>
> 5) Available on many platforms
>
> Nobody likes to see their applications become obsolete,
> like that raytracer I wrote on my NeXT. One of the best
> features of Performer is that its had a long run, which
> is now to continue on Linux (yeah!). But, its not on
> Windows and that is a big audience. Clearly there is no
> technical reason why Performer can't be ported to Windows
> or many other platforms - it just doesn't make business
> sense for SGI (and, in the case of Windows, it may not
> even be legal). Too bad, as this would be my #1 choice.

It seems dangerous to make claims about what makes business sense for
SGI. Clearly SGI thought it made business sense to work on Fahrenheit
for NT so we can see some benefit there. Today many of our customers are
asking for Linux, and some even prefer that as an operating system to
NT. If you have requirements then please pass them along to us,
hopefully you'll get the chance to do that in person at Siggraph. As for
the patience thing, I feel your pain.

I used to work for a VR company myself and we never waited on a
technology to facilitate a product port (we did wait for platforms to
mature). It would have made our life easy but instead we had Performer
renderers on SGI, home grown stuff on other UNIX and 3rd party software
rendering code (Reality Lab by Render Morphics(sigh)) on the PC. That
way we got the scalable performance demanded by high end SGI users and
could still deploy on other systems. The big difference was that back
then nobody was talking about going beyond OpenGL as a cross platform
strategy so the choices were fairly obvious. Performer was a way of
easing the programming task on SGI alone.

> PPS: see you at SIGGRAPH!

Great, let's talk at pfsig.

Cheers,Angus.

-- 
Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
                                       Neils Bohr 
Read this:
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/3d.html


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

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