Re: [palito-dev] Re: New renderer

[Tom Barnes-Lawrence]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2003 at 05:15:45AM -0300, address@hidden wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 09:06:40PM +0100, Tom Barnes-Lawrence wrote:
> >  Hmm, I thought a bit about using flush, but I figured it wasn't quite
> > suitable for doing everything (it does seem to do graphics well). For
> > a start, I need to export C callbacks to the texturer functions. I don't
> > think Flush can do that without hard-coding the functions in.
> 
> I implemented some months ago a function like flush_registerNewFunction()
> to make it possible to add new instructions in the flush language
> (or a flush code to call a C function..), but removed it later as
> I found a better way to work around the limitations that drived me
> to do that.  But I can make it again, if it can be useful.

 Hmm, maybe... but don't be in a hurry to do so! It was Zed's idea,
I'm not sure I'd want to use it yet.

> Flush is only being used in Palito until now, but I'm trying to keep
> it in a way that can be useful as a separate library as well.

 Yeah, I'd got that impression. But I'd been feeling that whilst, like
Postscript, Flush was kind of a real programming language, it was still
mostly suited to drawing graphics. OTOH, it'd seem odd for Palito to
be using 2 different scripting languages. *shrug*

> I didn't understand your issue very well, what exactly would you like
> to Flush to be able to?

  Well, it was for the procedural texturing support in IWR (the renderer
I'm writing). Each pixel of the image, IWR calls the user-defined function
written in Lua to get the colour for the 3d texture at that point.
It was Zed who was wanting me to use Flush, because he was having trouble
getting IWR to compile with Lua. AFAICT the problem is to do with include
paths, but he hasn't said yet, so I'm just guessing.

 Lua is pretty tiny, and seems to work well (apart from the compilation
problems, which the Lua people don't seem to bother talking about), plus
I still don't understand Flush too well, so I'd rather keep IWR using Lua.


 Currently, if IWR is worthwhile (Zed seems to think so, but you haven't
said yet, Barrett!), then the main things I still need to know are:

 -What exact problem Zed has compiling IWR with Lua (and where he has Lua
   installed),
 -What format Palito's heightmaps are (so IWR can read the damned things!)

 Thanks,
   Tomble