10.9.06

Now onwards! just having a go at getting lush to compile on my mac/os x 10.4. Why? well I'm a convert of paul graham's and want to learn lisp, but I'm also into graphics so lush seems about right. I'm a little concerned that it doesn't get updates more than once a year, but may well be a fun toy.

Finally got it built by following the readme and the obvious google links. Once it I was trying to run the demos I kept getting errors like this


*** error : cannot configure OpenGL
libglut.so could not be found.
please make sure GLUT or libMesaglut3 is installed.
Both the library and the development packages are needed.
(see /Users/tomkelly/Desktop/lush-1.2/packages/opengl/opengl-config.lsh for more details)

turned out I also needed to fink install glut, sdl-image & sdl to get the correct .so libraries to run the demo. I just installed it locally to try it out, then ran the lush1.2/demos/RUNME script and it gave me a neat (if slow) menu. I was kinda supprised how little code made the menu (compared to say - java & swing).


Really neat stuff - I gotta learn lisp and learn it good. I've got two things I want to work on nowish -
  • Terrain generation. I've just started reading papers, such as those about the ROAM algorithm - seems really compact algorithm for regular terrain meshes. I kinda invented it in my head the night before, realised how obvious the idea was and then found it online. Realtime mesh decimation (with things like animated deforms or 3D objects) seems like a fun thing to do. Annoyingly the US is way out front in this with the Lawrence Livermore Labs turning out some great papers. First thing is to look through the options - the types of decimation (removing a point, edge or triangle) in combination with organisational schemes (bintrees, octrees, triangle trees or BSP), ideally being able to plug each into each other to get some quick readings would be neat - perhaps lush will help me out on this. It'd be cool to come up with a non-regular mesh decimation technique that allowed for real-time deformations and animations...
  • A rigerous camp skeleton implementation would be fantastic and would be a really good start for a rewrite sity. General plan would be to work out the details, implement it and get it right in lisp then take back into java.
Come to that I find that graham is really into the web based apps, makes me feel a bit out in the cold...all the stuff thats really heating up at the moment is the web sheneagoats. Perhaps I need to get into the games market more - nah working in games would be too much like hard work after all those rumours of how hard they push people at EA.

Blogger rant - would it be that hard for the bloggy people to make uploaded images appear the cursor position? ;) Still I really like the beta version!