[self-interest] Mythical 3Dui

Jecel Assumpcao Jr. jecel at merlintec.com
Sat Nov 13 11:34:38 UTC 2010


Russell Allen wrote:
> As far as I know there are only two guis in 4.4 - iu1 and ui2 (which
> is morphic). Neither is particularily 3D though 'ui1' has a nice boxy look.

I do remember some mention of experimental code besides ui1 and ui2, but
couldn't find it again in a quick search. Certainly it wouldn't be
something that would be included in an "official" release at any point
in the past. I did find an email from me asking about it in 1996, but
there was no reply:

http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00858.html

Ah, I see that a little earlier I had found that out by looking at
benchmarks listed in papers about Self:

http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00895.html

> We probably should make ui1 an optional install for the core
> clean.snap for 4.5 to reduce confusion.

That would be great. If I remember correctly, ui1 wasn't available at
all when Self 4.0 came out. Many of its interesting features was
included in ui2, but enough were not that it is nice to be able to play
with the old code as well.

> On 13/11/2010, at 10:28 AM, Jan-Paul Bultmann wrote:
> Hey,
> I see the traces of some sort of 3d Gui, but I can't find any information about it.
> Could you give me some vague overview^^?

I'll mention some related project:

Nick Drew created a very interesting 3D program visualization
environment for Self, which he announced here:

http://www.merlintec.com/old-self-interest/msg00630.html

Unfortunately, the pages mentioned there vanished long ago and can't
even be found in archive.org. They included many neat pictures and some
movies.

I had the intention of creating a 3D GUI for Self and implemented a
quick prototype (first in GW Basic, then in ARM assembly language):

http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/gui.html

The idea was to build it in an alternative to OpenGL style systems
called "adaptive rendering" because it was similar in some ways to the
adaptive compilation in the Self VM:

http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/gmodel.html

-- Jecel




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