AltME: R3 Building and Porting

Messages

Pekr
NickA: during my private talks to Cyphre, he told me that if he would aproach the View engine nowadays, he would abstract it a bit, so that it could use various rendering backends - AGG, Cairo, so that where platform permits, it could be HW accelerated. But - such project would take some time, and Cyphre would have to be sponsored, in order to be able to do the work. I think, that it could be even written in a way, so that both R3 and Red benefit. But who knows ...
As for Red - no party is willing to port View engine, yet :-) Doc wants to aproach it other way - to use something like VID dialect, but final toolkit used would be the native platform one. Kaj did some example with Red/System + GTK, if I understand it correctly. I still think that even for Red, something like small View  engine would be benefical, e.g. for embedded work, where non traditional graphics is not a problem.
Dunno, how difficult would it be to get View sources adapted to Red/System. Red is missing on timers, events, etc., so maybe later, so that it can be naturally plugged in to its architecture ...
NickA
Thanks Pekr.  I spoke with Cyphre too - waiting to here if he's interested in being sponsored, and how much it would cost to make Android a priority.
here > hear
Pekr
sounds good :-)
Oldes
Btw.. with High Resolution Displays coming these days, the HW powered GUI is a must. The CPU rendering will be just for making high quality assets for GPU. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Intel-Higher-Resolution-Displays-Coming,15329.html
Pekr
with higher resolution displays, comes higher performant CPUs/GPUs. Tegra 4 announced, 4core A15 1.5 GHz + 1 A8 Core, 72 GPU cores .... I still think, that we did not utilise full power of AGG yet. Gee, View 1.x ran on my Pentium 75 machine ....
BrianH
Has anyone tried compiling R3 for ARM Linux? This affects RPi, Android, and misc. micro-servers.
Bo
Yes.  TGD got it working on RPi.
BrianH
I suppose that compiling for ARM depends on the particular ARM platform and instruction set.
Bo
To download a tarball of an executable REBOL 3.0 program for the Raspberry PI (build with Raspbian “wheezy” ) take a look at:
http://www.TGD-Consulting.de/REBOL/r3-RPi.tar
---
pi(at)raspberrypi ~/dev/r $ uname -a Linux raspberrypi 3.2.27+ #250 PREEMPT Thu Oct 18 19:03:02 BST 2012 armv6l GNU/Linux
pi(at)raspberrypi ~/dev/r $ ./r3
>> system/version
== 2.101.0.4.10
>> system/build
== 16-Dec-2012/13:13:11
>> system/product
== core
Oldes
With HRD comes higher performant GPUs but I'm not sure how CPU scales. Look at Adobe, they are almost dropping support for classic display list (rendered on CPU) and forcing everybody to use their Stage3D which uses GPU. It's not easy move as there is almost no tooling yet, but it's a must. CPU is not able to process so many pixels with the new screens (with high frame rate). I don't say we should drop AGG support, just that there must come GPU support using OpenGL/DirectX and let the AGG to do high quality rendering of assets.

MaxV
Bo
Actually, Oldes, that's a great idea!  R3's new GUI could be built to utilize OpenGL by default.  That way, the GPU would handle all the graphics calls, and R3 would have 3D capabilities built-in as a bonus!  This would probably even make porting to Android and other platforms a lot easier.  In fact, doesn't IOS (iPhone) use OpenGL?
Oldes
It is. OpenGL ES2.0. As well as Android. Actually I don't think there is a chance to do GUI on these platforms without OpenGL.
Robert
We did a short test some time ago to use OpenGL, works but is quite some work to implement it completely.
Cyphre
The problem of OpenGL is it is great for rendering bitmaps etc. that can be used in 'crossplatform' way and I'd like to make such frontend for R3.... But if you want to implement something like DRAW  in OpenGLyou are getting into troubles. To do it properly you would need to use GL shader fragments.
When it comes to shaders, that means my 8 years old notebook won't be able to render it :-)
Also note that on Android for example the Canvas class (which is comparable to DRAW) is still not HW accelerated AFAIK.
I guess same is on iOS....the "draw' api is also not using GPU
The HW acceleration is still currently mostly used only for moving textured bitmaps...kind of fast blitter in the 2d graphics area.
Ofcourse if you want to create classical 3d game from textured polygons, shaders etc. that's the area where OpenGL excells (and the developement was mainly focused)

Last message posted 269 weeks ago.