Yes! Lee Moon's flight simulator seems to hint at the Newton's 3D
potential, but I'm willing to bet it can upgrade from lines to shaded
triangles and (perhaps) even texture maps. Text-based 3D stuff would
probably run pretty well, but I looked at some of the screenshots and my
eyeballs said that might not be such a good idea.
What I am envisioning is that a 3D application be composed of 2
packages: the engine and the interface. The interface tells the engine a
whole bunch of coordinates in terms of 3-dimensional coordinates, and
the only purpose of the engine is to translate it into 2D lines (or
triangles). The reason for designing it this way is to save both space
and effort on the parts of users and programmers: One engine would be
able to support a CAD program, a game or too, and uh... "something
else". Kind of like MAD Max and MAD Newton! Lee was almost there,
because it's obvious that the same drawing routines were used, right
down to the window size.
I've actually worked out a lot of the geometry for making a 3D to 2D
translator from scratch, and I recently got NTK running with X via
TCPSerial. And I found out that my local library has a number of Newton
Programming manuals (Filed right in between 68000 assembly and NeXTstep,
kind of depressing, no?). It looks like you all may be seeing an
open-source Newton-native 3D engine in your future. What do you think?
Is it worth the effort?
-Animal
(Digest)
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