[Lazarus] LibC

[Reimar Grabowski]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2009 16:21:35 -0400
matt shaffer <dazappa.matt at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well I'm basically looking for a 3D library that has
> 
> Model loading (Blender does a good job of exporting almost anything, so long
> as the library does not have its own format I should be good)
> Texturing (Cannot get this to work with GLScene)
> Real time model transforming (For simple animated waves + models)
> Lighting effects (Shadows, colored lights)
> Particles
> OpenGL for hardware acceleration
Sounds like a game engine to me. I am not aware of any cross platform pascal game engine. My own (non-game-)engine does some of the stuff you need but particles, shadows and mesh transformation (I think this is what you meant) are not implemented yet and will not be for the foreseeable future due to various reasons.
There are some good C++ cross platform engines out there like Ogre and Irrlicht. If you are willing to create bindings you should be able to use these. I know that Ogre has Python bindings so it should be possible.

> I just cannot find many resources regarding cross platform 3D graphics with FPC
That's because there aren't any. 3D graphics coding is in the firm grip of C++ although lately Java made some steps into this territory. 
Low level 3D graphics coding is no walk in the park so there are not many developers doing this kind of stuff and less doing it with FPC and much less on Linux.

> Also I'm unsure of whether or not dropping an openGL component on the form
> would have solved my problems
If you are not into low level graphics coding (OpenGL) then it would not have helped. The component just offers an context where OpenGL can render to.
But you sound like you want to do high level graphics coding so you need an engine.
Nevertheless you can try the OpenGL example in examples/openglcontrol to see that cross platform 3D graphics are possible with Lazarus/FPC. I wrote it back in the day when I started to learn OpenGL and Lazarus was still young (not even the form designer was working correctly) and it was not updated since so it is no good tutorial for the API.

R.
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