3D Dreaming for KDE

Last week I decided to switch sides on something in my life. My life consist of a lot of switching sides. But this one is KDE related:

I switched back to Windows.

I think many people on the planet will now think that I’ve gone crazy, but for me it has advantages too (video performance, run 3ds max)

I obviously still run KDE now (trunk compile) and I cannot even begin to understand how I could have ever worked on Windows without using KDE. I finally understand why the German translation for Desktop Environment translates back to ‘Surface’, while in Dutch it translates back to ‘Surrounding’. KDE really is a surface when used in Windows and greatly improves the workflow (at least mine).

It still has some bugs (The ThinkPad TrackPoint scroll function  is not forwarded to Qt scrollarea’s, so I can’t scroll, Ark tries to create files in /C:\, which Windows automatically opens in the browser as http://C:\ and deleting files in Dolphin only works on the second try), but in general I can recommend people stuck to a Windows PC/Environment to replace the standard Windows applications by the KDE equivalent!

I though it might be convenient to make the taxi sharing for the way back. It was supposed to be on the attendees list, but that was a bit hard to find. So….

I made a new page on the wiki under ’8.5 other useful information’->’Taxi Sharing’ : Link Here.

have fun filling it out

I just put some stuff in Kolf to display the objects with different colors. It uses QColor::setNamedColor which gives course designers an easy way to use either RGB or CSS colors.

Obviously this is a nice feature . But that is not the real point of this post.

The real point of this post is the usage of certain OpenGL extensions we are planning to use. As posted by Stefan Majewsky during last wee there is work being done on a texture-creation application. That application now has a scale option which allows you to use more sizes of textures.

The good thing about this is a better resolution for the terrain (we use 1000×1000 for the grid and 256×256 for the texture at the moment). We could now start using 1000×1000 resolution textures which should make the terrain look nicer.

The problem here is the GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two OpenGL extension, which was approved by the OpenGL ARB in 2004. This extension works for Intel 945+, NVIDIA GF2+ and Radeon 7k+ cards. But not on the older Intel cards, S3/VIA chipsets and mobile hardware (it is not an OpenGL ES extension, so buh-bye N810/OpenMoko/Pandora etc.)

Is this still acceptable? Or does this go against the ideas of KDE Everywhere and should it work on hardware? (in this case: force the texture to be a power of 2 one, so max. 1024×1024)

The hardware has gotten so many new features over the last few years which can cause problems for KDE in the next few years. For instance: will we improve Marble for people with OpenCL enabled cards so that it runs and renders up to 50x faster, or do we not start to use these features because most of the people still have old hardware?

As most of use know this is a problem in the whole it world where the fruit company and the really small software company force people to buy new computers, but we cannot really do it. So what is a general support lifetime we should use? (at GCDS I’ve seen people with 6 year old hardware)

Just a first post for now, coming from my hotel on Gran Canaria.

My name is Casper van Donderen, I’m  a Mediatechnology student studying in Utrecht, the Netherlands and interested in everything with Computer Graphics. Most people don’t know me probably, but I’ve been helping at the CeBIT & LinuxTag KDE stands this year.

At the moment my only developer contribution is the 3D view for Kolf 2. Stefan posted a blog about a day and a half ago about the progress of Kolf 2 and I’ll be joining in on that, but then more from the 3D side of things (hardware shadows are a goal for this week).

Other ideas I want to start working on soon:

-  A visualization engine for Amarok

-  Revive Boson and start developing a complete strategy game for KDE.

-  Other stuff I might come along this week on GC.