I take it that someone hacked Jack's account. With all that's going on in the other forum, about the rewriting of posts with cute "regional" dialects, an ethnic joke doesn't seem appropriate... Ciao! Joe (from Detroit)

Re: ..and it continues to fester... Well, if anybody is modelling Fester, my favorite version is the one from the original TV series, not the movies or the comic strip (although, technically that is truest to the original intention, it wouldn't make a good model). Ciao! Joe

No, but you did want a large, distributed project similar to how the GNU compilers or ijg (which didn't develope JPEG itself, just a toolset) were developed. What made these projects work was the low cost to get into the game (free compiler) etc. Poser was written in CodeWarrior, and, at $500 / seat, I doubt we'll have a large number of people stepping up to this. Additionally, the development method was "develop on Mac, port to Windows". Which means we'll have to quickly shift to "develop on Windows (or Linux) and port to Mac, since Mac programmers only account for about 8% of all software developers.

When I program in Windows, I program directly. Learning > the basics is enough without deciphering the alien > intricacies of OWL I do not understand you at all. A good class library, such as MFC, OWL, wX, or PowerPlant is not an "alien intricacy", it is an efficient, high level way of handling the incredibly intricate Windows API. I assume by "directly" you mean that you program only in straight C, to the Windows API calls in the SDK. I've done this, and the same task usually takes four times as much code as a comparable OWL or MFC app. My engineering budget may be big, but it's not unlimited. Anything that provides a reasonable boost in the productivity of the programmers is encouraged, if not mandated. > or getting into a bullfight with OLE Again, what are you getting at? Using a class library does not mandate that you use OLE. If your program needs to be OLE enabled (i.e. if you're writting an application which must work within an office suite, or you just want that "designed for Windows" Microsoft seal of approval), then you must work with the OLE api. This is true weather you are writing "directly" in C to the Windows API, using a class library like MFC or OWL, or an application builder like Delphi. Weather it's a "bullfight" or not would be determined by your skill level and project managment skills.

Java itself isn't really the problem, it's usually the particular web browser's implementation of it. Netscape is fairly mild, it's only needed four patches for Java security holes this year. IE has needed about 4 times that. If all the Java does is crash your system, you're getting away easy. Some Java traps can eat the system. Now, don't get me started on Active X. Ciao! Joe.

Well, assuming we can get source ;-) ;-) ;-) Only problem with the GNU effort is that the development process for Poser is based on a very large and powerful class library from MertoWerks (part of the CodeWarrior compiler package). The beautiful thing about this is that this library gives you everything, GUI building tools, file IO, even multithreading (that's how RayDream supports multiple processors on both Mac and Windows). Development at MC is mainly on the Mac, then the Windows version is tweeked into operation, but the CodeWarrior approach lets you go either way. GNU on Windows (Either Cygwin or ECGS) is still a bit iffy, and there's just no truely major league, serious cross platform library (although wX isn't bad, and it does Linux, too). GNU on Mac is real iffy. So the team has three alternatives: 1) Rewrite everything in wX for GNU, which is a whole lot of work, and will likely yield a buggy finished product. 2) Purchase Codewarrior for everyone involved in the distributed development. This is likely to be expensive. 3) Write a wrapper class library to adapt CodeWarrior calls to another class library (again, probably wX). This would be a fairly large effort. The neat thing is that many of us could be hammering away at it on our GNU/wX setups, writing code for a MetroWerks library which we don't actually have, and debugging using the translation layer. Then, for a final release, we recompile on one system with real MetroWorks CodeWarrior. (Although we use the GNU/wX for our Linux release). Well, that's far enough over the rainbow for one night. Ciao! Joe

The Zygote .exe files are zip files with a "self extractor" option. If you are using Winzip 6.2 or 6.3 (the last decent Winzip, in my opinion) you need to download a "self extactor" addon. This will take the zipped file, add on just enough code to extract the zip, and give it a .exe extension. As far as coding the rest of it, if you're going to use Borland C, there are several good books on it. But you can learn an awful lot by disecting the examples in the "examples" directory. Especially the files in examplesowlapps. Draw, Pait, and Mthread will give you a good start on 2D stuff like UV Mapper. If you want to get into 3D apps, you might want to look at some of the OpenGL under OWL tutorials floating around on the web. IMO OpenGL is way easier to learn, faster, and more powerful than DirectX. And it will help you greatly if you ever want to port to Mac and/or Linux. Ciao! Joe

That is exactly what I'm working on, but the task is really enormous. It involves interpolation of one mesh with another. If the verticies don't match up, find the three closest verticies, interpolate the location of the new one, and you've got it. Simple in theory, a pain in the rear in practice. Ciao! Joe

Clue meet Anthony. Anthony, this is a clue... There is no such thing as "free". The advertisements are what pays for the free sites (including this one). Bypass this, and there won't be any free sites, anymore. That's what Jack's post is all about. If people link directly to files on THIS site, they use HIS server's bandwidth, without reading the advertisements that pay for this site. This is probably not a good thing. My only point is that it's probably not the best place for him to take an ethical stand, since "freestuff", a very popular part of this site, is built around the very thing that he's complaining about. Ciao! Joe

Jack, Ask your man "fur" about this kind of software. He is an expert in it. He wrote the code for this forum's "freestuf" section which bypasses such protection on other servers. This allows people to store their freestuff files on services such as Geocities and Xoom which prohibit using their servers in such a manner. If he knows how to break it, he should know how to write it so it's harder to break. Ciao! Joe

Does this mean you're going to start storing the "freestuff" files on your server? As I recall, your forum software has some rather interesting code to make it possible for freestuff contributers to store files on "free sites", even if those sites have taken precautions to make this difficult, because they want people to read the banner ads that pay for THEIR bandwidth. Remember how much trouble, how many itterations of the funstuff (before it was freestuff) code Roy went through before this would work on Geocities? Ciao! Joe

Does this mean you're going to start storing the "freestuff" files on your server? As I recall, your forum software has some rather interesting code to make it possible for freestuff contributers to store files on "free sites", even if those sites have taken precautions to make this difficult, because they want people to read the banner ads that pay for their bandwidth. Remember how much trouble, how many itterations of the funstuff (before it was freestuff) code Roy went through before this would work on Geocities? Ciao! Joe

This conversation looks very strange. I'm not seeing any of these "trav2" posts. Ciao!

As far as cross-platform languages and the engines which compile/run them, most people here don't enjoy going through the effort of getting them running. Then again, I could be wrong... :) Tony, it's no more effort to get a cross-platform setup running (in general) than it is to get a non-cross platform setup running. On the Mac side of things, the most popular C compiler is already cross-platform, you just have to make the decision (before writing the application) to use the PowerPland application framework, instead of MacApp. If you are already experienced in MacApp, this is a pain, but if you're open to a new framework, then it's a snap. wX is more of a pain. It took me most of a day to get it running on the PC under the Borland C compiler. On the other hand, it just installed and ran on the Linux box. 10 minute job. Go figure.

There are also interpreted languages like TCL/TK and Java that permit you to write a program that will run on any system (once you've loaded the 175 megabyte runtime library for your particular machine ;-) The problem with these (at least for my work) is speed. When your program is trying to manipulate 30,000 sets of 3D coordinates in real time, an interpreted language just does not measure up. One cross-platform system that I'm moving to is OpenGL, either within the wX windows framework, or in an OpenGL application framework called GLUT. Whatever I end up with (wX or GLUT) I'm still going to need a brave volunteer with a Mac and a compiler to compile the Mac version. Anyway, better to cross platforms than to cross swords.