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MacHack 1997
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1996-06-21
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About WatRend
-------------
By: Gavriel State
gav@magmacom.com
http://www.magmacom.com/~gav
WatRend is a portable 3D rendering engine. It's run on at least
5 different OSes (MacOS, x86 DOS, Linux/X, Be OS, and IRIX/GL),
and at least 4 different CPUs (68K, PPC, x86, MIPS). It's a
fairly primitive scanline-style renderer, intended to serve as
a platform for playing with scanline algorithms. At least one
alternate algorithm has already been plugged in.
WatRend was started in December 1994, and has gone through a
couple of revs since then.
I did the BeOS port here at MacHack in about 3 hours, having
never seen a Be Machine before. It was easier than the other
ports in some respects (very easy bitmap, view, and windowing
classes), and harder in others (I had to completely rip out
the event loop core of the main program and replace it with a
threaded, message based input model). A very cool machine,
overall. At the same time, it was a *very* quick port, so
the view class is really skanky and full of cut-and-pasted
globals.
Running WatRend
---------------
WatRend requires input from a command line (the MacOS version
has a little startup dialog to get the input). The command
structure is:
WatRend [PLG file] [size] [#objects]
PLG File is the path to a Rend386 style .PLG file.
Size is the size multiplier for the object. Start with 1 and
experiment from there.
#objects is the number of objects to create in the sample.
Actually, it's *half* the number of objects to create; each
object has a child object that orbits it.
Examples:
WatRend ../../plg/torus1.plg 1 1
WatRend ../../plg/box.plg 0.2 4
Within watrend the following keys are active:
i - pitch down
k - pitch up
j - roll left
l - roll right
o - accellerate
u - decellerate
space - stop
y,t,g,h,b,n - control the objects' rotation.
r - stop object rotation
a - dim lights
s - brighten lights
f - flip backface/foreface removal
d - hi-res/lo-res toggle
c (Mac only) - toggle CopyBits/Direct-To-Screen drawing.