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The Topographic Apprentice
Article
Issue: 1.1 (August/September 2002)
Author: Joe Nastasi
Author Bio: Joe Nastasi is the developer of a spacecraft simulator, A-OK! The Wings of Mercury, which was created with REALbasic. Joe, who has been a programmer since 1977, has been a full-time REALbasic consultant since version 1.0 and is the author of the REALbasic Explorer series featured on the Real Software website. He lives with his family on the New Jersey shore.
Article Description: An introduction to 3D graphics
Article Length (in bytes): 10,990
Starting Page Number: 38
RBD Number: 1011
Resource File(s):
1011.sit Updated: Friday, October 17, 2003 at 12:19 PM
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.apple.com/opengl/
http://www.opengl.org/users/downloads/
http://www.quesa.org/info/download.html
http://www.quesa.org/quesa_forum.html
http://www.realbasicdeveloper.com
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
You stand before the large wooden door with trepidation and before you can raise your hand to knock, it creaks open. The ancient one nods and speaks. "I've been expecting you." As he leads you into the dark chamber, you notice that it is filled with dozens of geometric objects. Spheres, cubes, pyramids; all spinning and changing color. "The road to real-time 3D can have a treacherous topology, my young apprentice," he warns. "But I have faith in you."
Welcome to The Topographic Apprentice. You'll have to forgive the introduction: I took the kids to see Harry Potter right before I started this! The goal of this column is to provide a painless introduction to real-time 3D programming for games and other applications. I (otherwise known as "the ancient one") will make the assumption that you are a REALbasic beginner and have never worked with real-time 3D before.
A Bit of History
When I started to use REALbasic to build my spacecraft simulator, A-OK! The Wings of Mercury, I had no idea how I would handle the requirement for real-time 3D graphics. After trying an as-yet-unreleased plugin and struggling to work directly with the OpenGL libraries, I discovered Rb3D, a plugin that was written by REAL Software developer Joe Strout.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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