Hi, just to inform about my 2 first projects:
:
I’ve been creating projects for zope and porting some python games to zope immedately after I heard about it. So it’s time to port Panda! I think I get a lot of experience from that.
:
Voxlap renderer for panda. I’ve already tried to port voxlap to python, after 2 months I stopped it, it was horribly boring. So I’ll try to change panda’s directx render to voxlap renderer (it’s quiet easy). It’s use will be very easy, just put in from gorrila import dx after all other imports and go! The only problem(which is the problem of voxels) is that it’s using 2,5 bigger RAM than if it’d be poly, but the FPS and gameplay incraise more than in vox2poly! And don’t forget to put same name equialent of your .egg to .kvx or .kv6 formats.
no offence. but voxels are NOT suited for todays hardware. afaik there is not a single comsumer-class graficcard supporting hw-accelerated voxel rendering.
aside from that voxel volumes can eat up ways more than2.5 times the memory. also texturing and animating is tricky.
voxels are branded as pre millenium technology and there are only few things they are still used for. most of the time voxels are only used internally in combination with algorithms such as marching cubes to generate a polygonal surface which is then rendered.
so my question would be, is there any use for it? will it still be able to handle the rest of panda and all non-voxel based geometry etc?
Oh, thanks. Ok, yes, there’s no HW support for voxels, but this doesn’t mean that it’s slow! Gorrila is using voxlap by Ken Silverman(http://www.advsys.net/ken) and Tom Dobrowolski(http://ged.ax.pl/~tomkh/)<-Credit.
Ken’s programs are famous, because they’re HORRIBLY FAASSTT!
And tom’s utils&programs are famous because they’re very tiny.
It just calls voxlap renderer instead of directx renderer and searches for a kv6 or kvx file with the same name like the .egg file. This is all I’ve done to now. I don’t find Gorrila interesting cuz it lags:(
And, yeah, I forgot, implenting Panda to Zope was quite easy, so I got to implent program-server comunication, so you can do highscore, users and etc.
my question was not if its slow. or anything. but if its able to handle all the non-voxel stuff panda currently supports and if its of any use for anything else than voxels. cause voxel rendering itself is not very nice to look at. or rather. it has the charme of a space-invader or pacman grafics.
do you have any screenshots of this running in panda?
whats about its visual quality? cpu usage and rendering time vs window-size? whats the maximum size of the voxel volumes. etc
can you post some more technical details like that?
i ask cause i highly doubt that its usefull for anything else than an ugly looking scorch clone.
I don’t know, I’m still just playing & trying with it, but it has to look like this:
And my PC specs:
AMD Ahlon XP 3400+ Overclocked(2,8Ghz)-120FPS, non overclocked(2,01Ghz)- around 30/60FPS
MSI K8NGM-V
GeForce 6100
120GB TESLA TTR-6000
P.S.:This is a screenshot from voxelstein 3d. Gorrila just rewrites the directx lines in panda to voxlap calls&functions, that’s all, you can imagine it, and voxlap looks like this:
or this:
And the homepage:
advsys.net/ken/voxlap
And gorrilas logo:
looks like pointsprites could do the same with hardware acceleration.
using veretx clouds as input.
i still think that the useage of voxels is too limited.
anyway. does this code run on linux/mac ,too? can you provide a small sample application showing it in-action?
besides…30-60fps for that tree is pretty slow. its only a tree after all. add the rest of the game and nothing will move.
Well, Tom, I still got pretty much coding before I can try that on Linux/Mac/JVM/JVMe2(I got em all!HAHA!) I can do the app, the only problem is that you will have to uninstall panda, than install Gorrila and than panda again. AND, now I am NOT doing on Gorrila, I am doing on ZPanda, which is my MAIN project. I don’t know why you are so pointed on Gorrila, which is in reality 29 lines of code and 2 pages on paper!
i’m not pointed to anything specific. i’m just intrested on further details on how panda would work with voxels and if there are any intresting ways to use it.
Known bugs(Gorrila):
If using built-in effects, immedately crashes.
Lights don’t work properly(for example: color is always 1,1,1; directional lights always ask for direction or crash and etc.)
No d3d/GL extensions work
If d3d/GL called by graphics card than, no word, the response is horrible… 
Imported egg, bam files won’t work, I think that panda thinks that it’s another panda’s version egg/bam
setPos() calculates bad, you say 10, and it’s 1000km from it… 
almost nothing appears to be truly working
Known exceptions:
WHAT did you type!(my own exception 
)
Known bugs(ZPanda):
If you place a code bad, your browser crashes(Tested on all available:Opera 1 up to 9; IE 4 up to 8 beta, FFox 1,2,3; Safari; Telnet+; Omega; PyNet)
NOTHING ELSE! OMG, it’s first time something by me works properly! ZOPE RULLEEZZZZ!!! 
so… its pretty useless for now.
too bad. might have been interesting at some point.
If I’ll get loading bar working than I’ll post a screenshot tommorow!
But basicly it’s nothing special, it’s just the thing you get in Panda3D window but in browser… But I am proud that I’ve finally did the main functions working there(the basic blank+loader.loadfile() )
The whole thing is that some functions that are window-related, like rendering(but not it’s variables-effects) have to have this 2 lines*:
v=function()
zope.interpolate(v)
and in addition it’s name in zope and it’s priority to the program( usually it’s prefered to write 50% priority, and than let the browser choose).
That’s all folks!
*Wait, that’s not the right code, I’ll add the right one next time;)
the loading bar still exceeds far out of 100%, and never stops. I think my manager involves that “glitch” while calculating that percentage:)
P.S.: In reality it’s just copying the nescessary files into X:/zpandacookies where X is the location of windows or usr or bin folder:)