SGI announces port of IRIS Performer

SGI just announced a Linux porting effort for IRIS Performer. Performer is an OpenGL-based scene graph library optimized for visual simulation; it's used in areas like military and commercial flight simulation, as well as the rides at DisneyQuest. Release is expected before the end of 1999. Performer is designed to drive the fastest graphics hardware and run the most demanding graphics apps in existence, so this is very good news.

Comments

Why not do Inventor First?

[BlackHat]

As I understand it, Performer can be builtup
under OpenInventor. So why not do it right
and release OpenInventor4Linux.

Any one have more info on this[mongoose]?

Re:Why not do Inventor First?

[Performer Guy]

I am a developer on the Performer team at SGI. IRIS Performer is not built under or over Open Inventor it runs on OpenGL. It cannot be used with Open Inventor within an application although it can load Inventor file formats into the scene graph. To support older SGI systems it can also run on IrisGL by linking to a different set of libraries. Mongoose is just a project code name so Performer on Linux is nicknamed mongoose.

IRIS Performer and Inventor have quite different design objectives. Performer focuses on maximum Performance and scalability (fast hardware, multiple processors and multiple graphics pipes), Inventor is designed for ease of use and user manipulation of 3D data. Performer also has more of an emphasis on features and file formats required by the simulation and training industries.

For tutorials on how to program with Performer as well as lots of screen shots & source code of some advanced Performer demos see:

http://www.dorbie.com/

This should give you a taste of the kind of graphics empowered by IRIS Performer and how you go about writing code for them using the API.

The lowdown on Linux

[jfunk]

Ok, I just got home in a cab (you know why :-)* ) and what you said prompted me to reply about applications.

I've been running Linux since '93 do I've got quite a bias. However, advocacy in the way I do it works (especially when talking to programmers).

My mother used excel since the Win3.1 days until I bought a new PC that included Lotus Smartsuite 97. She was hooked. She never looked back on Excel. I moved her to my brothers Win computer so that she could use 1-2-3 because LILO often dumped her into the Linux console if she waited too long (5 seconds). This confused her and I was often woken up from hangovers to help her get into Win or attempt to recover from a BSOD.

Recently (a couple of months ago) I installed SuSE. She loves it. Linux doesn't crash on her and she's happy with StarOffice. I'll soon show her LyX, which I'm sure she'll take to. She avoids my brother's Win machine simply because it crashes. And the vnc server simply blew her mind. I also installed a PHP/MySQL site I developed at school and now she has access to a contact database from anywhere with Internet access.

The way many programmers think (if they don't, they should) is 'Will my mother use it?' I think Linux currently has that capability as long as there is an admin (me, in this case) who can solve problems.

Just a year ago, I would never have pushed it on her. Times change, and she's happy for it.

She loves the 'no crashing' idea, because she's plain sick of blue screens. When I told her it didn't have to be like that, she was all ears.

So my point (I'm currently 'under the infulence' so please excuse typos, etc, if you've been in this state :-)* ) is that applications are currently available under Linux, and therefore any *NIX. I'm currently praising KDE, because it has so much potential (try KDevelop, I now depend on it. Also check out the documentation, wow) as an API and a way to bring Win users over to the light side.

ESR said that someday people won't tolerate crashes anymore. It's starting to happen.

Rock on,

Re:The Future of Farenheit?

[Thagg]

Fahrenheit has never made sense to me.

I worked with Paul Strauss, Rikk Carey, et al, on Iris Inventor
back in '92 and '93, and enjoyed the work, the people, the
environment, and the project -- although now I consider the
idea of a toolkit at the level Inventor was designed to fill an
impossible goal, once a toolkit is powerful enough to fulfiill the
requirements of Inventor, it circumscribes the problems that it
can solve.

Anyway, I talked to Paul Strauss at last year's Siggraph in
Orlando, and he told me not to worry, that Fahrenheit
wouldn't replace OpenGL (which I believe is amazingly
good); and that the Microsoft people were behaving
appropriately, that is, they had reasonable respect for SGI's
experience in 3D graphics libraries.

Still, it's been a year, and I have seen no progress whatsoever
toward these new libraries. Perhaps there is internal
'Developer's Program' documentation to which I am not
privy.

I note with some amusement that the only question posed
and not answered at

http://www.sgi.com/software/performer/faq.html

is "How does IRIS Performer relate to the Fahrenheit
Project?" Every other question in the table of contents
is answered below.

I'm sure that I'll find out what the current status of
Fahrenheit is at Siggraph in LA next month, I hope that
my prayers are answered and Fahrenheit was just a bone
tossed to Microsoft, that will be buried in the backyard
and never seen again :)

Expect more from SGI

[Skyshadow]

Actually, I think that we can expect to see a lot more from SGI over the next few years.

Of course, their huge contribution so far is (the promise of) XFS. Linux and other OSS systems are stealing a few years of progress from that; a journaled file system is a big step towards being truly enterprise ready.

The reason I predict we'll see more from these folks is that one of their VP's (Beau something-I-can't-spell) came out earlier this week and said that there'll only be three OSes in ten years, and IRIX ain't on the list. Assuming that SGI's planning to be around in a decade, and assuming that they're not stupid enough to want to pay the MS-Tax for their entire server line, they have a vested interest in seeing Linux evolve.

Of course, personally I think VP Beau is wrong; I have a feeling that IBM/Sequent's new "next gen UNIX" offering is going to crash and burn on the launch pad -- the potential market's got to be really leary of anything resembling another splinter of UNIX. I can't imagine why they're wasting their time with it and not contributing to Linux; you'd think the suits would have learned by now that you can't play on Microsoft's terms and win.

In any event, I'm looking forward to seeing more quantum leaps with companies donating their "best of the breed" niches to the Second Coming of UNIX. I think the rate will pick up as more companies finally realize that they can't turn back the tide of NT by themselves, and that Linux is their only realistic hope to avoid becoming Just Another Windows OEM.

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