[Papervision3D] Apollo 3D

[Nicolas Cannasse]

> Nicolas,
> 
> I admire you for doing all this, and I think it's an awesome
> achievement. It's coder pr0n, and clearly, it got me even more
> interrested in haXe then before. But here's my problem with this;
> who's going to be able to run the neko/haXe/openGL things ? Because,
> without a target audience you might as well do C++....
> Again, don't get me wrong, your work is somebody I appreciate, and
> which helped me lot's in my daily workflow, but this is where I got
> stuck for now....

Hi Ralph, and thanks for your comments :)

You're right, the goal of OpenGL lib for haXe is not to replace the
ubiquous Flash Player for website content. It's primarly made for
desktop content, where users have to install a small application anyway.

I think it makes a lot of sense to use haXe instead of let's say C++.
Because of Neko C FFI, you can put all the "engine" features in a C DLL,
and use them from an highlevel language such as haXe. That's what is
making Flash so much quick to develop with than doing the same in C++.

There's a lot of people also that want their content to work everywhere.
Let's imagine that PV3D is ported to haXe ;) By adding the appropriate
conditional compilation directives, it is easy to add an OpenGL backend
for PV3D. That means that PV3D users would be able to compile either a
Flash (6,7,8,9) SWF or for an OGL HW accelerated desktop application.
All this with the *same code*, since haXe works everywhere :)

The only specific parts will we about handling the events and
manipulating the clips, and initializing a desktop window for the
Desktop app, but everything can be as well abstracted by writing apis
with implementation for both backends.

What is nice with haXe for Desktop apps is that it takes something like
300KB (uncompressed) for the complete VM + stdlib + opengl lib, so even
for small desktop apps it's a very small overhead. And of course, it
works on Windows, OSX, Linux and even more since it's open source. (Wii,
PS3 and X360 support soon ?)

Best, and keep up with the great work,

Nicolas