Clerical Rigor

GTK+ OpenGL work

There’s an opening at Canonical that I’d like to take after the current contract is up. It’s an opening for a OpenGL dev on the Ubuntu desktop team.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy working with my current group quite a bit. We’re building a pretty neat tool. However, building OpenGL into the GNOME desktop has been a personal goal of mine for quite a while now.

I bought a Voodoo II in 1999, just after I graduated from high school with the hopes of building a video game. The tools for Linux were sparse. There was Blender, but the learning curve is very high, the source was not then open, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to build the whole game by myself. So I started building a 3d modeler myself.

I got as far as building a quake .mdl loader with rotation, scaling and primitive animation. I was pretty proud of myself.

I haven’t gotten too far along the path since then, however. Time required by work has increased, and I haven’t been able to find a way to make the two projects (food on the table, continuing work on the modeler) mesh.

In 2006, I was able to take over maintaining gtkglarea and fix a couple of minor problems. I wrote a c# wrapper around the widget library using Mike‘s excellent gapi tool. I was able to help Rob, Dave and Dylan with Tao.OpenGL (which led to a bit of work on Prebuild). I helped Sam a bit to make gtkglarea-sharp production-ready. But I haven’t had a chance to get that modeler finished…

I’m nothing if not persistent, though :)

C.J. Collier

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4 responses to “GTK+ OpenGL work”

  1. Please contact me to try to work in my spare time to the modeler too. Use my hidden email. Hopefully it will get better and I would enjoy to learn and to work on it. Best wishes,
    Ciprian

    Reply

    • Thanks for the offer, Ciprian!

      I haven’t started re-writing it in C# yet. Woe. That’s the direction I’d like to go moving forward.

      The old C code is here:

      http://svn.colliertech.org/svn/trunk/jenkara/

      But last I tried, it didn’t build. IIRC, it’s also a terrible memory hog. If you get it building and running, I can get you a .mdl file you can test with.

      John Carmack told me that, although it is ‘officially’ not allowed, they wouldn’t sue me for using their art in relation to building this code, so don’t worry too much about that. :)

      Cheers,

      C.J.

      Reply

  2. Hey CJ! I hope everything goes well if/when you get hooked up at the new position. Really looking forward to seeing what’s produced!

    Dylan has made some excellent progress with the old BooGame. I was very impressed when I saw the swappable window framework with support for both SDL and FtGl.

    OpenTK is still kicking too! The forum has a lot of activity, and he keeps the updates coming.

    What I’d love to see on the Ubuntu side, however, are updated Debian packages of all these. Dave told me that some Tao Debian packages were going into the next Ubuntu repository, but I haven’t heard anything since. Help us, C.J. Adams-Collier, you’re our only hope!

    Keep it up, man! Hope your 2009 goes well.

    Reply

  3. Hey there Rob,

    I remember seeing a taoframework package in debian a while ago… It looks like it’s on hold until the lenny freeze is over, though.

    http://packages.qa.debian.org/t/taoframework.html

    I asked Sam on IRC:

    17:03 <@cj> sam: rob loach was saying something about the tao debian packages.
            what ever happened with those?
17:06 < sam> cj: I have newer packages ready, but didn't upload them since
             we're still in freeze
17:06 <@cj> sam: okay.  I'll give Rob the info :)

    So, it’s on the way.

    In related news, Jenkara is building. The glade file needs some love in order to get the app running, though. I’m talking with some folks over on #gtk+. We’ll get the kinks worked out here soon, I think!

    Reply

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