Need advices for choosing a 3D API

Engines, Libraries and Tools Java 3D
#34

Yes I’m a newbie but I’ve been using humor for a long time. To make sure that was understood I put in the biggest smiley available. ;D

But of course there’s a serious undercurrent. I find company bashing of the Good vs. Evil kind extremely childish. I also think blame should be put where it’s due. Why downplay Sun’s long neglectance of Java3D?

Anyway thanks for the discussion. I’ve come to the conclussion that Java3D still probably is my best option. JOGL is very low level and OpenGL doesn’t seem to fit into Microsoft’s strategy. Xith is based on JOGL and the Java3D specification. Xith may be more efficient today but that doesn’t seem to be an established fact and the time works for Java3D because of the introduction of multicore processors that will handle the threading better.

I can only hope Java3D will be kept efficient, bugfree and available on many platforms including very soon the 64-bit ones. A reasonable aim I think would be to support everything Eclipse supports. In my view the only strategic advantage of Java over C# is the portability, so it’s important that Java3D doesn’t restrict application portability (who wants a Porta Restrictor to strange their application? :)).

/Ulrika

#35

First, this ad-hominemn attack. One of the 5 standard fallacies of proaganda and a sure sign someone hjas no real intelligent arguments left to make.

Second of all, this has nothing to do wuth company v. company. This has everything to do with MSFTs actions in the market over the past 20 years and the quality of their OS.

And as I’ve decided you are a troll, AFAICS this is officially

PLONKED

#36

Well you ARE a Sun employee aren’t you?

What do you call this: “MSFT sells their crappy OS”? I call it bad-mouthing the competition.

You also did downplay Suns behaviour regarding Java3D by trying to establish 1 year as the time-period Sun left people hanging. It was a far longer period Java3D was in decline. After version 1.3.1 it took something like 2 years to recover and deliver 1.3.2.

So now you’ve decided I’m a troll right. Isn’t that one of those personal attacks you’re accusing me of? To retribute that I’m going to declare you a troll too. You’re one of those trolls who take themeselves far too seriously. Be careful. If you suck in more air you may explode!

#37

* cylab grabs a pile of popcorn and leans back ;D

But seriously… what’s the problem? Just opinions, ehh?

@ .uj
you really should not misinterpret a personal opinion with a corporate one, regardless who is the employer of an individual…

@Jeff
.uj had a point, you really are bad-mouthing against Windows ;). I for myself like Windows and I think it’s a much less crappy OS than everyone says. On the other hand I don’t like MSFTs marketing strategy…

#38

The only people that think Windows isn’t crappy are people that tried to use Linux as an alternative.

Consider the resources available to Microsoft. Now consider that the Windows File Explorer, the primary interface to the OS (explorer.exe) still doesn’t update the tree view properly when you do a basic operation like create or delete a directory. Or consider the progress dialog for copy operations that might as well use a random number generator for the “estimate time remaining”. Or the fact that the built-in support to “un-zip” takes an order of magnitude longer to uncompress a zip archive than any of the free utilities that unzip (e.g. time unziping eclipse.zip with explorer.exe right-click vs. any other tool). Consider how agonizingly slow it is to simply use explorer.exe to list a directory (particularly a network directory) even compared to the command line on the same OS. Consider the broken filesystem that thinks access to C:\myProgram\myConfigFiles\com1.xml is trying to access the serial port! Consider the virtual memory system that does the opposite of what virtual memory systems are supposed to do and actively works to keep everything in secondary storage instead of RAM!

That Windows sucks is a universal truth, it isn’t an opinion any more than 2+2=4 is. :).

#39

[quote]The only people that think Windows isn’t crappy are people that tried to use Linux as an alternative.
[/quote]
;D cannot not argue against this…

I base my opinion towards Windows on how good I get my tasks done. At this point I might miss the problems since I spend 70% of my time in idea or netbeans, 20% in cygwin bash and 10% in Outlook/Office… so I notice problems about 10% of my working time :wink:

#40

Kesselman’s OS contentions

(1) ANY OS that fails underneath me and has to be reinstalled on a regular basis is shit

When is the last time you heard of someone having to do that with Solaris? or IBM’s VM? or even Linux?

(2) Any OS that claims to be multi-threaded but cannot handle multi-threaded calls to its most fundemental structures (the GUI system, DirectX, etc) is shit.

Again, when have you seen that limitation in ANY other OS that dares to call itself multi-threaded?

(3) Any OS which is relased with better then 50,000 bugs is DEFINITELY shit and MSFT admitted as much when they said they FIXED 50,000 bugs in 2K when they released XP.

Im not talking about user experience here. Thsi isnt a user experience forum. This is a coder’s forum.

And the only coders who think Win32 isnt shit are the ones who have never coded a singificant app in a better enviornment. Which means almost any other environment.

Myself I’ve coded in Unix (multiple flavors), Linux, MacOS, OSX, OS/9 and AmigaOS.

Of ALL of those the only one that comes close to being as frustrating is OS/9 but even it is a whole lot less outright buggy.

Here endeth the lesson

#41

This thread took a strange turn ;D

I didn’t want to start a Windows/Linux war. Thanks for your replies about 3D APIs, I now have the hardest part to do … coding :wink:

#42

YOU didnt start the war, so don’t feel guilty 8)

And thanks, Im gald it helped.

#43

Look at the pompous troll. Claiming thanks just for calling himself Jeff. :stuck_out_tongue:

#44

I can not ignore user experience. To be honest, I give a shit, if there were 50.000 bugs in Windows. As long as I get my work done, I am happy. Windows is where the applications are, so I use it. This has nothing to do with religion, idealogy or technical quality, it’s just reality.

I used linux a long time, but I have to say, that the “big” desktops are just plain buggy. And it was getting worse, so I switched back to windows. I cannot speak of solaris, since I never really used it, but the last time I have seen it, it was just plain ugly :slight_smile: (which may be totally unrelated to it’s tecnical qualities) The only thing that bugs me with MacOS (as far as I know it) is the brainless “useability” decision, that I can only resize a terminal window at it’s bottom right corner :wink:

Windows just works as a Desktop system and I really haven’t noticed most of its criticized flaws. And if the explorer crashes, it restarts… HORAY ;D

At last I want to make clear, I am not an Windows advocat or something, I just express my opinion on this.
I think all the CAPS just provoked me to say something :wink:

@.uj
I am very impressed by your ability to de-escalate… maybe you should nominate yourself as the next US president :stuck_out_tongue:

#45

Well I really don’t think you would want a Swede to replace the Austrian you already got as runnerup for precidency. :wink:

The de-escalation ability is nothing really. It’s what any female gets trained at from birth. Hail to Condoleezza.

#46

No just kidding cylab.

But please tell me why I should save a pompous nobody from himself?

#47

And now I continue the way off-topic ranting… ;D

[quote=“cylab,post:44,topic:26058”]
That’s exactly the trouble. You are basically forced to use the OS because of the need to run certain applications (or play certain games :))

You don’t use it because it is a good OS, you use it because you have no choice. That doesn’t mean the OS isn’t complete crap.

Re: Mac OS - Ever since getting my first Mac a few years ago it was like a breath of fresh air… I had nearly suffocated to death from Windows, having used AmigaOS before that (AmigaOS was sooo many years ahead of it’s time as far as the desktop was concerned). When I moved to Windows it was nothing but frustration, some of that is to be expected when you know one system and have to switch to another… but even after that stage, the frustration continued because I had already used something so much better.

The Window OS has been playing catch-up for the last 20 years. In many respects it is still lacking good features that were available in the mid- to late-eighties on Mac or Amiga. Sure it has modern features that the OSs back then never had… but why leave out such important features as a usable shell (console or GUI)?

When Jeff mentions multi-threading and how it still is basically unsupported on Windows for most things, I can point out how in 1986 AmigaOS was already better in that regard (and don’t forget it took Microsoft nearly TEN YEARs to match with something resembling a multi-tasking OS).

The suckiness of Windows is quite clear. If IBM hadn’t handed Microsoft their OS monopoly on the desktop they would probably be long forgotten by now, and computing in general would be 10 years ahead of what we have today. The industry really took a big hit when the “IBM PC” dominated the market and set back technological achievements by several years. I remember the PC-owners of the day saying funny ridiculous things like “who needs sound on a computer?” or “hardware sprites, more than 16 colours, and blitters are only toys for silly video games.” Oh well. :frowning:

Anyway in many technical respects MS still has it’s head back in the 80’s the very basic things like a reasonable filesystem and shell are still missing. … after 20 years of the competition having better stuff. The competition still beats them on a technical basis and they have been out of business for decades :). Heck, it was only recently that MS hack around the 8.3 filename limits… which are still plaguing the OS today. My Commodore 64 could use 16 character file names back in '81 :).

So if resizing a window only with the bottom-right corner is the only thing you can fault an OS for… well that OS must kick the crap out of Windows.

#48

I find rantings like this uttermost childish. Microsoft always has been and still is, a good thing. You want your own will imposed on everybody. Thank god there’s Microsoft to prevent you from forcing yourself on everybody else.

#49

Im sorry… was there actually any CONTENT you wanted to add?

Guys, this ---- is a stupid silly troll, I wouldn’t waste your breath on him.

Im not anymore.

#50

Always looking for popular support like the bully he is. You scratch just a little on the shiny surface and the brown substance beneath starts oozing out.

#51

Pot meet kettle.

[quote]Microsoft always has been and still is, a good thing.
[/quote]
Is Bill Gates your uncle or something :slight_smile: .

[quote]You want your own will imposed on everybody.
[/quote]
I do? really? Is it working? Wait a second… I’ll try to concentrate real hard… did it work? Am I imposing my will?

[quote]Thank god there’s Microsoft to prevent you from forcing yourself on everybody else.
[/quote]
Which god should we thank? I bet it’s one of those mean nasty gods that keeps thowing thunderbolts and blowing people up. That sounds like the type that would force Microsoft crap on everybody… like some sort of eternal torture.

We can lock this thread too… I’ve had about as much fun as I can get out of it. :slight_smile:

#52

[quote]No just kidding cylab.

But please tell me why I should save a pompous nobody from himself?
[/quote]
Maybe because Jeff gave good (sometimes admittedly biased) advice and information in about 2500 posts… How does that compare to you? :wink:

#53

Windows rocks :wink: what on earth are you talking about saying the file System is bad and it is much beter than any Linux OS ive tried
and i do not get why you think windows it is so bad