Yazel, David J. wrote: > quick demo app showing some neat shaders. To presume that Java3d is going > to be the limiting factor in the quality of your game at market time is a > bit like saying that your ability to win the next marathon is dependent on > the quality of the shoes you will be wearing.
That's a pretty niave statement about game development. Games take 2-3 years to write. That's a known fact. However, they take 2-3 years after a particular piece of functionality has been exposed in the API. That means if Java3D takes another 2 years to get shaders (ie an FCS specification, not betas) then it is _at least_ 5 years before any Java3D games are on the market. Considering that you are seeing the first generation games coming out now that use shaders that makes any Java3D game 5 years behind the market that want to have comparable level of graphics. Not particularly good for encouraging people to use the API for developing top-notch, high-end games. Of course, the one mitigating factor in this particular example is that the J3D shader code is going to ignore the first generation completely and come in somewhere around the same time that the other competitive APIs do - ie high-level shader language. Therefore, a good chunk of that lag is going to just disappear and hopefully J3D, OGL and DX9/10 games will all start from roughly the same capability set. At that time, hopefully the ability to code Java code faster than C/C++ will lead to a situation where J3D games hit the market sooner than their OGL/DX equivalents. -- Justin Couch http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/ Java Architect & Bit Twiddler http://www.yumetech.com/ Author, Java 3D FAQ Maintainer http://www.j3d.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would be useless in a mouse's universe..." - Greg Bear, Slant ------------------------------------------------------------------- =========================================================================== To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "signoff JAVA3D-INTEREST". For general help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body of the message "help".
