On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 6:02 AM, Andre Roberge <andre.robe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 1:34 AM, kirby urner <kirby.ur...@gmail.com> wrote: > > <HUGE SNIP> >> >> Clearly I'm not writing enough to replace the INSTALL.txt here, not my >> intention. This is more some encouragement to developers wanting to >> work on a VPython curriculum, still probably Python's best answer to >> Ruby's quasi-native access to OpenGL. >> > > How does "Ruby's quasi-native access to OpenGL" compare with what one > gets using pyglet? (http://www.pyglet.org/) > > André >
You know, I'm having trouble reconstructing how I came to the view that Ruby has quasi-native access to OpenGL. I think it was a few OSCONs back when I was intent on immersing myself in Ruby, went to a couple tutorials, the talk by Matz. My recollection is sitting there in an interactive Ruby shell, following some tutorial, and getting some colorful shapely things happening on my screen pretty early. But now when I go back, sifting through blogs and tutorials, I'm at a loss. I see Yoshi has the opengl extension, and that people are building on that. I watched this YouTube: If you look at the Vpython API, it's very high level. Arthur felt drawn to it kicking and screaming for his Pygeo, still one of the most impressive interactive geometry programs ever written, and in Python no less (with Vpython). He used to be my connection to the Vpython crowd but since then I've been switch boarding through Lincoln, Nebraska as Dr. Bob Fuller emeritus is a contact in common. Thanks to VPython, my students are able to focus on geometry, not computer science. Our focus is a simple arrangement of polyhedra, a kind of zen garden, a namespace. We want them thinking about rhombic dodecahedra, not how to create a context window or rotation matrix although the latter will come up, and we have Numpy at the ready if we need it. However, Vpython allows the interactive rotation of any graphical object you create. In stickworks.py, I provide simple Vector and Edge classes. The former do what Vectors are supposed to e.g. + - and * / with scalars (you can upgrade to Quaternion to multiply two vectors, then drop back into Gibbs-Heaviside, but that's just for play). So we use operator overloading, which isn't a mystery as we've used these __ribs__ already when introduction Rational, Modulo, Polynomial (ala Litvins) and several other simple "math object" classes (right after Dog, Cat, Monkey, Human -- all as subclasses of Mammal type). I'm not aware of any other coupling between a general purpose coding language with a bright future, and a simple OpenGL engine that doesn't require huge amounts of study to use. Pyglet is extremely low level in comparison, more like Pygame (SDL) in that sense. If you've already turned yourself into a C/C++ programmer, these toolkits feel liberating. However, my students are more likely coming from a ray tracing language like POV-Ray's, or from VRML/x3D. They want to give XYZ coordinates of something, say what shape it is (cone, tetrahedron, cylinder, blob) and be done with it -- just add texture (optional) and fly. Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
