Have any of the knowledgeable MorphOS programmers (Team members, or 3rd party programmers), had a chance to look at, or use, or at least read about the new Hollywood Open GL plug-in for use with all Amiga type platforms, including MorphOS and it's TinyGL implementation? What exactly is it, and how useful can it be for beginning programmers wanting to create some games or software applications for MorphOS, or any of the other supported platforms?

I understand that this new plug-in does not increase 3D capabilities on any of the target platforms that Hollywood supports, but to me, it seems to be a good thing to have an added tool to help with future programming, specially if the tool is aimed at making it easier for beginning programmers. If this new plug-in can help make it easier for beginning programmers to create 3D games or applications, it would seem to be a very good thing, but I am too new to programming to evaluate the usefulness of this new tool, to know how useful it will be, or if it is mostly useless to programmers who should use to use different methods to create software, instead of depending on, or learning to use something like this new tool.

I think it is very nice if we can have 3D test suite that runs on every Amiga flavor + mainstream. It should be very valuable tool for developing the 3D libraries for HW acceleration.


(From what I've read from comments, HW might not be the optimal language for massive games that need to take the maximum out of CPU, but mainstream-like mammoth games are out of reach anyway??)

Quote:

I doubt that using Hollywood would be a good choice to code 3D libraries for hardware (HW) acceleration? Seems to me that using "C", or "C++", or PPC Assembly languages would be better choices than a scripting language based on LUA, but then I am only a Wanna Be Coder, not a real programmer, so what do I know.

Also, it appears that you are using "HW" as an abbreviation for Hollywood in one part of your message quoted above, and then using "HW" to abbreviate "hardware" in another part of your message. That could be very confusing, don't you think? I agree that Hollywood is probably not the best language for coding massive 3D games, but that was not the question. My original question was if Hollywood is a good programming language for beginning programmers to learn, or would "C" be a better choice?

Quote:

You can't develope3D libs for a system with this plugin!
This plugin layes on top of a hardware 3D driver.
You can do thuch thing like the many demos in the hollywood hompage.

Hollywood and C are different languages. C is more lowlevel and much more complicated to learn. Positive of C is much lower prog size and much faster execution time.
Positive of hollywood is a full featured eqipment to develope
all possible things like web browser an -server, ftp client and - server,
3D Things, XML, SVG Import, MUI GUI's, Databases, Cairo grahics, FFMPEG Things
Import and Export of movies and so on...



[ Edited by pegasos-sigi2 10.06.2015 - 18:33 ]

Quote:
IMHO Hollywood is a great choice for occasional coders (like me) and/or beginners. I learned C++ first and progressed rather slowly. It's not only the language itself, but more about the API. A thing I never came really far on MorphOS.On Windows it's much easier with the great help functions of Visual Studio and google searches. At least I came so far to write a multithreaded time critical I/O program on Windows with C++ while I failed on most things I tried on Amiga/MorphOS.
When using Hollywood you don't use the host system API directly, but Hollywoods own API - and that is rather easy. I really like Hollywood and am not sure whether my eternal plan to improve my C++ skills is required any more, as Hollywood became pretty mature and powerful..
The language itself is comparatively easy, but can easily lead (at least me) to write some kind of spaghetti code since you don't need a precise plan, but can just start to write (on C++ you are lost without a good structure just from the beginning). Keeping that clean, structured and readable requires some effort.
And it's still some work. Dunno how fast others code, but for me even rather simple programs take time to actually do. I am just writing a simple reaction time measurement program. No big thing, but to make it actually ready for action (I will use it for school teaching next week) it took me a few evenings already - work in progress: http://via.i-networx.de/R2Z/about.htm

[ Editiert durch Zylesea 11.06.2015 - 00:41 ]

>WB_Coder wrote:

>I doubt that using Hollywood would be a good choice to code 3D libraries for hardware (HW) acceleration?

I only meant that Hollywood might be good for doing the test / benchmark tool for the 3D libraries R&D work.

(a little bit like what 3DMark is for windows. But H3DWoodMark would just run on any/every OS, GPU and CPU)

[ Edited by KimmoK 11.06.2015 - 14:29 ]

Quote:

It all depends on what level it's done on. If it's got things like LoadModel(); DrawModel(); etc. then I wouldn't see any problems with that, but if it's instead some kind of "immediate mode wrapper" (a feature that should be avoided at all costs), which basically enables you to plot 3D coordinates one by one, it's definitely done wrong. Of course you could code a model drawing function in LUA on top of immediate mode wrapper, but that would be as wrong as it can get.

NOTE: I have absolutely no idea how it's done, just pointing out what I'd consider good and bad solutions.

Of course sometimes you DO need to "plot 3D coordinates one by one", and of course there are better ways to do that than immediate mode.

Also worth pointing out that many moddable games (f.ex. Legend of Grimrock) use LUA for much of the game logic. Of course Hollywood isn't a "moddable game" but something lower level, just pointing out that LUA is quite widely used in 3D game industry.