[simspark-devel] pixel camera perceptor

[Joschka B. <jos...@am...>]

Hi all,

I've been thinking about how to implement a pixel camera perceptor for  
Simspark using hardware-accelerated OpenGL Render to Texture via the  
Frame Buffer Object extension (see, e.g. [1]). I'm not proposing we  
should adopt this in the 3D league, but it will be handy for doing  
research.

One problem I see is that this is a sensor, but it relies on rendering  
also. In the multi-threading implementation, these two are seperated  
as far as I remember, right? Maybe it is not a problem, since the  
rendering only needs to produce the image, which can be copied in the  
thread for the perceptors, but I'm not sure about this, so I thought  
I'll ask for ideas here.

Another thing I've been wondering about is whether it would be worth  
it to compress the images before sending it to the agent or not. Of  
course this will depend on color depth and size of the image, as well  
as network delay, but encoding (and decoding on the agent side) would  
also take time. For small images and a fast local network without much  
delay, it might be overkill I guess. Again, any ideas are welcome.

Cheers,
Joschka

[1] http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2331.asp