Re: [Plib-devel] PLIB developers needed.

[Gil C. <g.c...@ca...>]

At 09:41 PM 8/8/00 -0500, you wrote:

>I'm feeling severely swamped by the amount of PLIB stuff that's heading
>my way recently.  There have been a lot of really good things offered - but
>I just don't have time to fit them all in.  Dave is doing great work - but
>we really need a couple more people just like him!
>
>There are a couple of hundred people subscribed to the various PLIB mailing
>lists.  Would anyone else like to step forward as an active developer
>(with CVS write access) ?

(Casts eyes down, scrapes toe in dirt, rubs back of neck)

Ahem, yes. I won't try to make excuses for where my commitment has gone, 
other than to point you guys at another "interesting" project called 
matterial, a compositor/non-linear editing system for Linux.  It's early 
days at the moment, but have a look at http://matterial.sourceforge.net/ if 
you're interested.

I did promise great things with VRML import/export which never got 
finished.  I guess I should commit to doing some more work on that, plus 
other things as required.  The McClurg dynamo has part of the VRML work 
done for Blender, but my lex/yacc stuff is probably a more general solution.

There's also a chance that I will be making use of PLIB - more specifically 
SSG - for some new work here at CSIRO, so I might have a "real" reason to 
work on it soon.  Basically, I've been trying to find a commercial scene 
graph toolkit which is fully supported, and works across NT and Linux.

Pretty hard thing to find - a lot harder than I thought it would be:

* Open Inventor doesn't really do what we need, and is Yet Another Dead 
Scene Graph
* OpenGL Optimizer is even deader than Inventor
* Viskit would be great if Paradigm decide to start supporting it again - 
and if it ran on Linux.
* R3 Vis Corporation's RM Scene Graph isn't shipping yet, and Open RM is a 
little unknown
* Iris Performer is great, but no chance of ever running on NT while SGI 
still exists :-)

SSG looks pretty good in comparison to this bunch, so it's really in *my* 
interests to help keep it going.

FWIW, my most likely use for SSG is for a terrain system for flythroughs of 
large scale mining models.  Lots of textures, lots of hi-res meshes, lots 
of problems...  My most likely addition to SSG for my work here is a CLOD 
system, whether it be quadtree, ROAM, VIPM or something else.  My biggest 
concern is that I might not be allowed to contribute my source back because 
of IP restrictions on our research.

So what else is needed at the moment?  Perhaps something which isn't quite 
work-related might be good :-)

Regards,

Gil