Re: ObjC 3D engine
Re: ObjC 3D engine
- Subject: Re: ObjC 3D engine
- From: "Paolo Manna" <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:15:31 +0100
As the author of one of the 3D libs out there (on Sourceforge and
perfectly 'googlable', so should be easy to find), and admittedly
probably the least useful around, I guess I can step in and tell my
experience...
First, let me say that I didn't stop working on it: it has been
expanded, but in directions that were suiting my needs of the moment,
so not enough to justify publishing, but more on that later...
About a year ago I was looking for a good open-source objc/cocoa 3D engine. After
several days of searching, the best I could find were a few outdated and/or abandoned
frameworks (note: I could just suck at searching, so if you are working on one don't
take offense).
No offense taken: looking at the SF files, one could easily think that
there's no one doing anything anymore... but that doesn't mean this is
actually the case!
I realise that could lead to a larger discussion on open source in
general, but please allow me some considerations...
I decided that it would be a huge learning experience to write my own, so I did. Or, to
be more accurate, I hacked together a bunch of classes which suited my needs.
Quite resembles my own experience: I used it for myself, to learn and
to put together tests I needed. Publish it as open source, and with a
very liberal license, seemed the next logical step: point is, there
has been NO feedback at all from the community (too simple? too rough?
not interesting at the time? your guess is as good as mine). My mail
archive shows exactly 1 (one) feedback in the last 2 years (positive,
admittedly, but that's all!), against a quite respectable 4300
downloads. Now, it's probably difficult from outside to realise that
going open source, especially from a single developer, is quite an
effort, whose only reward is the fact that someone, out there, could
find your work useful: the lack of interest (real or perceived) could
easily kill the eagerness of the developer (again, speaking for
myself, but I think this could be general). As developers, we also
know that our needs aren't the needs of everyone, so without external
opinions, we can't realise what the 'real world' apps require in first
place, and easily assume that no one really cares...
Enough emotional rants, though!
In any case, I now have about 15k lines of cocoa 3D code that I want to put to some use.
I will say again that I *do not* have anything resembling any of the mature C++ engines
out there. I just have a start, if that. But I would like to get some of your thoughts.
Technically, I can't offer opinions: if you've evaluated my code,
you're in a better position to judge if there's any common point we
can work together on to merge. As said above, please don't think that
the state of the art is online: it isn't, but as you say, cleanup is
needed, and, again, feedback is vital.
HTH
Paolo
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