Pete's Log: graphical goodness
Entry #929, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)(posted when I was 22 years old.)
I like my new Offspring cd.
So I finished up homework 6 for graphics. It was fairly easy, but very time consuming. But I had fun. We were supposed to make a 3d N and a 3d D which were supposed to spin if certain mouse buttons were pressed. So I got that part accomplished. Then I decided that the parallel projection mode wasn't good enough: I wanted perspective, gosh darnit! So I spent a long time messing with glFrustum and gluLookAt. I'm either a complete idiot, or the graphics book didn't explain frustum quite right. But finally through experimentation I figured out how it worked and I now have cool 3d spinning ND in perspective! During my experimentation I encountered a variety of trippy results. OpenGL is cool.
So the next move: turn this into a screensaver. First off, figure out how to interface with xscreensaver. Not much in the way of documentation, but I was able to hack up the gltext module and add an interlocking ND that floats around the screen and rotates and stuff. Nifty. Tried running it on the suns. It works, but xscreensaver-demo doesn't work on the suns, because suns xserver sucks. But who cares, it works under linux. Of course, the nice thing about the suns is the hardware opengl. The frame rate is definitely higher on the suns. But it's high enough on linux and xscreensaver-demo works on linux. So now I wonder what an easy way to distribute this would be...
I'm very disappointed about not playing soccer today. Stupid snow. oh well. I was an opengl badass instead.