Quest for a software renderer, part 2 - Proce55ing Sucks!

Engines, Libraries and Tools
#1

This is a follow on from my earlier search for a suitable software renderer.

I’ve been trying to get things working with the Processing software renderer, but am becoming more and more frustrated by it’s quirkiness and general lack of features. Mostly it seems to lack two features I consider mandatory for any kind of 3d engine - back face culling and depth testing (zbuffer). Add to that the fact that all textures are bilinearly filtered and there’s no way to turn it off, I’m slowly reaching the conclusion that it’s unusable and so need something else.

(And that’s before I’ve even mentioned the badly thought out and badly named API, and near-absent documentation. Frankly the whole Processing library is crude and doesn’t feel like a mature library at all, even though it’s been around for 5+ years).

So I’m looking for a software renderer this time. Requirements are:

  1. Ortho rendering (possibly faked via perspective with a tight FOV)
  2. Back face culling
  3. Depth testing
  4. Blending
  5. Alpha testing
  6. ‘nearest’ texture filtering.

Suggestions anyone?

#2

Didn’t somebody make a Java OpenGL API software rasteriser somewhere?

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Part 3 and I’m all out of options:

  • Processing isn’t suitable because it lacks a depth buffer and back face culling.
  • 3DzzD isn’t suitable because it has an unusable camera and no ortho support.
  • Jpct isn’t suitable because it has no ortho or vertex colour support.
  • JavaGL isn’t suitable because it only supports flat-shaded polys.

Very disappointed. :frowning: I’m really hoping there’s one out there that I’ve missed. Anyone?

#4

might be a silly answer, but have you looked at JavaFX 2.0? last I heard they have an OpenGL, DirectX and software renderers and does do 3d.

#5

To be honest I’ve largely dismissed JavaFX as bloatware - it’s very hard to find concrete technical information on it, and everything I’ve seen suggests it’s an all-or-nothing approach, so I wouldn’t be able to just take the software renderer without having to use FxScript (or whatever it’s called now) and their own crazy scenegraph.

Happy to be proved wrong though.

#6

I suggest to code your own. You are a talented guy and writing a rasterizer for ortho-mode only is pretty simple, because there’s no perspective distortion…everything is simple linear interpolation. The time it took to search for a solution could have been spend better for creating one that fits on your own.

#7

I’m pretty sure JavaFX 2.0 got rid of the FxScript and switched to Java being the primary language, if that makes it more attractive