Any OpenGL/Graphics programmers here?
Discussion
I have some numpty questions on graphics programming...
We are speccing a software system to visulise satellite channel utilisation.
We think we are going to want to render about 12,000 shaded polygons to provide a real time view of the system, does anyone know if this is achievable for via Open GL and what kind of frame rate we'd be likely to get?
I appreciate it will depend on hardware, but say on a typical Dell Desktop PC, or would we need top notch graphics hardware?
I have very little experience in this field, so if anyone can recommend some engines to play with.
cheers
Ex
We are speccing a software system to visulise satellite channel utilisation.
We think we are going to want to render about 12,000 shaded polygons to provide a real time view of the system, does anyone know if this is achievable for via Open GL and what kind of frame rate we'd be likely to get?
I appreciate it will depend on hardware, but say on a typical Dell Desktop PC, or would we need top notch graphics hardware?
I have very little experience in this field, so if anyone can recommend some engines to play with.
cheers
Ex
scorp said:
What exactly are you drawing? If its a bunch of cubes or a surface (3d graph perhaps?) then the ogl api will handle that fine.
Thanks again scorp - I'll take a look at that.
There will be a maybe 12 or 16 graphs on screen at the same time, some of which could be 3D.
The plan is to make the selected graph zoom to front centre whilst keeping the others viewable in miniture form around the edges. It needs to be really really slick, perhaps animated zooming and unzooming of the graphs. Possibly we'll want it skinned so that we can easily change the look and feel.
There'll be lots of little boxes scrolling status information, recording alarm conditions etc. Other boxes displaying how many users are on the channel, what kind of data they are running, what capacity thay are being allocated, what capacity they are actually utilising.
We're also looking (read that as struggling) for ways to visualise the amount of empty space on a channel, i.e. wasted space that was not allocated to anyone, or allocated space that was not used.
It's tricky as 'slots' on the channel are allocated in 5, 20 and 40 milli-second blocks, so as you can imagine if you want to visualise 5 minutes worth of data it's quite a few little of blocks on a graph, - oh and all scrolling in real time.
The more Star-Trek that we make this look the better chance we have of selling it.
If you or anyone you know is capable of pressenting this amount of information (we'll help with telling you what graphs we need, what they represent and discuss where to put them on the screen etc), we'll put together an ICD, and are looking for someone to create an API into the graphical front end that we can then take over and work with.
There is some good money available for this work, currently it's looking like no one here is going to have the time to learn the skills we need to achive this.
cheers
Ex
Thats a funky looking app dilbert, what does it do?
What do you mean by "GDI Direct"? If you mean ordinary GDI then its probably the slowest form of rendering on win32, opengl would murder it, especially if you have a 3d card + drivers. GDI+ is pretty fast too.
What do you mean by "GDI Direct"? If you mean ordinary GDI then its probably the slowest form of rendering on win32, opengl would murder it, especially if you have a 3d card + drivers. GDI+ is pretty fast too.
Edited by scorp on Friday 15th December 19:17
dilbert said:
scorp said:
dilbert said:
I'm a great believer in unmanaged code, but I think most see me as a dinosaur.
Same here, shame to hear about win32, i use that myself when im doing windows stuff (i normally develop on games consoles). The new platform sdk has deprecated half the std clib!
I don't think there's anything concrete yet, they said the same for Vista, and Win32 made it in. Obviously with Vienna, the jury is still out. I'd still favour portablility myself. As far as I can tell GDI+ just sits atop GDI. I suppose it might be/have some sort of direct draw capability.
TBH there's very little of GDI that I actually use. I have my own support for bitmaps, resources and such. About the only thing I havn't completely done myself is floating menus, but that is on the list.
Funnily enough I tried compiling up my stuff under the free version of VC#, and I noticed that the standard libraries had been deprecated. Fortunately I only had three calls to memset and one to strlen!
I think GDI+ is directx based, im not sure, but its a LOT faster than vanilla GDI and does cool stuff like bicubic filtering on scaled bitmaps
Were/who do you work for btw, out of curiosity?
I could do with someone like you 
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