[Chicken-hackers] 3D project sought

[Brandon J. Van Every]

I'm up for leading a 3D OpenGL project, if anyone else wants to take on 
that sort of thing.

If I had enough people, I'd go for a fullblown 3D engine.  I think 
Chicken would have many advantages for expressing scene graphs and for 
scripting.  We can compile the scripts.  One needn't decide between 2 
different languages, the way it typically is with the "C++ and a 
scripting language" dance.  I hate that dance.  It's what caused me to 
look at OCaml, then Bigloo, then Chicken.  I'm not interested in 
wrapping an extant 3D engine.  There would be too much crap dealing with 
people's C++ stuff, garbage collection stuff, and scene graph management 
stuff.  I want it written in Scheme and for it to be Chicken's "killer app."

Lacking so many people, I'd at least like to get a modern OpenGL 2.0 
binding done, and a windowing toolkit.  For both those things, it may 
mean wrapping extant C libraries.  I want these things to be 
cross-platform.  This is problematic on Windows because Microshaft has 
been screwing OpenGL for a long time now.  MS OpenGL header files are 
only at version 1.1.  The libraries Glee and Glew do some magic to get 
around this problem, so that you can program with a 2.0 library and not 
worry about what Windows supports.  I don't know how good either 
implementation is, but Glee has the better license.  I haven't really 
gotten started on this problem because it's a boring one.

Whether a 3D engine, or a more modest 3D windowing toolkit, demos will 
be needed.  Projects like this impress no one unless there's eye candy / 
demonstrable results.  So we would need people to actually use this 
stuff somehow, to put Chicken on the map.

Any takers?  Minh Thu has expressed interest; anyone else?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every