I'm a graphics nut. I remember fondly my early days rewriting portions of Borland's graphics API to speed it up; I watch movies I know will be horrid on the big screen just so I can get a good view of the special effects; every few years, I write a 3D engine for fun; it's possible I've spent more on graphics, games, and UI books than on every computer I've ever owned; given a choice of topics to get paid writing about, I immediately pitched a series on 3D engine design; and any given day I can be seen searching for the latest tidbit of graphics hardware news or furiously scribbling/typing notes for my next act of Hubris.

It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.

Articles

Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 1 (perl.com)

Basic framework, SDL_Perl and OpenGL set up, and simple depth-buffered objects.

Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 2 (perl.com)

Rotating the view, time and animation, events and keyboard interaction.

Building a 3D Engine in Perl, Part 3 (perl.com)

Screenshots, moving the viewpoint, simple lighting, subdivided object models.

Examples for 3D Engine in Perl series: .tar.gz (30 KB)

Includes all code and screenshots from all published articles in the series in one tarball for your convenience.

Benchmarks

trislam 0.1.17: source (18 KB)

trislam is a crude but effective method for testing the overhead and maximum performance of various OpenGL methods for pushing triangles. It also handily demonstrates that, with proper care, SDL_Perl's performance limitations need not be a bottleneck for a 3D application. I have been able to achieve results within a few percent of theoretical maximum performance for my hardware, in both vertex/triangle and pixel throughput.

3D Engines

T3D

T3D was my first general 3D engine design in Perl, as opposed to previous attempts which only displayed one particular scene or type of object. Unfortunately, it was written before I had access to OpenGL hardware, and as a software-only interpreted renderer, it was slow. Very slow. Still, it could output to animated GIF images or a TK canvas, used PDL to handle the linear algebra, and generally taught me what not to do the next time. It's also pretty much the only thing you'll find here that doesn't require SDL_Perl.

PIGGE (Perl Interactive Graphics and Games Engine)

A few years after I stopped working on T3D, OpenGL had become commonplace, SDL was all the rage, and it was clearly time to start over from scratch with a 3D engine based on more modern technology. This is that engine.

Downloads

trislam benchmark 0.1.17: source (18 KB)

Description in Benchmarks above.

Examples for 3D Engine in Perl series: .tar.gz (30 KB)

Includes all code and screenshots from all published articles in the series in one tarball for your convenience.

PIGGE 0.1.2: tar.gz (74 KB)

This is just a tarball of my working tree (with CVS dirs and other effluvia removed), the same one linked from the PIGGE downloads area. Eventually I'll convert this mess over to some decent packaging, but given the current hacker-friendly state of the code base this will have to do. You will need my Config::Multilevel and Status modules to get this running; they can be downloaded from the modules section of the urandom page.

SDL_perl 1.x

Wayne Keenan's new SDL_perl 1.x releases now have their own homepage on this site. Please look there for updates and downloads.