[Visualpython-users] From newbie: compile beta error

[Jiang Q. <jq...@ph...>]

Hi all:
	I'm new to this list. I installed the stable visual-3.2.9 and it 
worked great. But I really would like to to get the transparency to 
work.  So I installed visual 4.beta16. I jumped through all sorts of 
hoops, and finally got it to work. The transparency works quite well. 
But I have serious performance issue.
	I mainly use visual to visualize packed spheres, and small 
particles inside the spaces between them. In visual 3.2.9, a system with 
a few hundred spheres packed inside a cube works very smoothly: I can 
rotate, zoom at will with middle and right button. By combining the two, 
I can essentially "walk" into the sphere packs.(The spheres rendered are 
not perfectly smooth, but I manually changed some lines in the source 
code to make the smoothness ok). It all works fine, the only thing I 
miss is transparency.
	However, in visual 4.beta16, using identical code(with *no* 
transparency yet), I get a spectacularly smooth and well lit spheres, 
but the tradeoff seem to be heavy performance penalty: I can barely zoom 
and move, the rotation is slow. Interactive zooming and rotation is the 
key reason why I use visual: otherwise I can just render things in 
povray. Needless to say, I would like to find a way to trade away some 
of the more spectacular visual effects to have better interactive 
performance.
	I tried to look through the documentation of beta, but there 
aren't too much info about performance tuning. The only thing I found is 
to set shininess to 0, which helps marginally at best.
	What other tricks can I use to improve interactive performance?  
For example, can I tune the smoothness of the spheres? Sometimes my cpu 
usage is not even fully 100%, but dragging, rotating and zooming the 
image is still very slow.
	It'll really be a shame if I have to revert to the old version 
due to performance issue.  There must be a way to balance performance 
and effects.
	In a related issue. I also need to render particles between the 
spheres in the pack. In the old version, I basically render them as 
smaller spheres. But in the new version, there's a mention of point 
objects, which seems to be just for that purpose. However, there's not 
too much documentation of the point objects. How do I use them? Do they 
offer a lighter overhead than the render spheres? Can I give them 
colors?
	On the final note, a word about my system: I have a thinkpad 
T43, with Pentium M Dothan 1.86MHz, 1GB PC2-4200 memory, ATI X300 mobile 
discrete graphics(M22) with 64MB of VRAM, and 60GB 7200rpm disk. It's 
not a powerful machine by today's standard, but it runs the old version 
of visual just fine. Also, runs other 3D accelerated openGL programs 
like googleearth and stellarium just fine(glxgears score, which I know 
is not a benchmark, is around 1750 FPS).
	The software environment is an outdated ubuntu(5.04), with 
custom compiled 2.6.18 kernel, gcc version 3.3.5, python 2.4, fglrx 
proprietary driver 8.42.3(latest).  Numpy 1.0.3, the latest gtkglxtmm I 
compiled and installed from source.  If you want to know more, let me 
know what more relevant info I can give.
	If there's a simple patch for the stable version 3.2.9 that 
enables transparency, I'll be very happy to use that, too. Because 
really the stable version satisfies all my need except for 
transparencies.
	Thank you all for any hint/help you can give.
								Jiang