[pro] XMLisp: a CCL + Cocoa/Cocotron based Lisp for Mac and Windows with built in media support (2D, 3D, sound, ...)

[Alexander Repenning]

Dear All,

we have been providing some funding to the Clozure and the Cocoton open source projects supporting the creation of a media rich cross platform environment called eXtreme Media Lisp or XMLisp for short. XMLisp, as such, is not the main goal of our project. The goal is to create a next generation authoring tool for kids to get excited about computational thinking. More about that BIG project here: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/wiki/Scalable_Game_Design_wiki

The real point of this message is to share our efforts in the hope that you can use some of the code and perhaps could even contribute by writing extensions, try the code on difference platforms etc. You can find the 0.5 version apps Mac and PC here: http://code.google.com/p/xmlisp/ 

Included are:

3D: Open Agent Engine: scene graph based mini engine, 3D objects, animation, drag and drop, mouse hovering, picking, selection, camera control, texture management. Full access to OpenGL functions including shaders (GLSL).
2D: controls: layout managers, buttons, sliders, text
Media: Sound, Text-to-Speech (OS X only)
Events: mouse, keyboard, multi touch, gestures (OS X 10.6 and later): pinch, rotate, scroll
IDE a simple development environment including symbol completion to edit, run and debug code

This should allow you to create an OS X native Cocoa app and port it with little effort to Windows. On the Windows side we are using Cocotron which is a very large library to provide Cocoa functionality. Especially for 3D there were and still are some issues left in Cocotron. It would be great if some of you could try to run especially the 3D samples on your windows machines and report back to use how well things are going. Particularly, some of the more advanced OpenGL functions such as shaders are much trickier to deal with on Window platforms running OpenGL. Generally speaking Microsoft is not putting a big effort in making sure OpenGL will run well on Window machines. Depending on what type of machine you have OpenGL may run much slower that it has to. With the right drivers and setting we find that OpenGL on Windows in XMLisp performs at about the same speed on the machines that we have tested on but extremely simple scenes, e.g., one triangle, Cocotron still has some buffer swapping overhead that we like to get addressed. 

Please play around with things and let us know how well (or badly) things are going. If you create some samples please send them. We could add them. The hemlock based IDE is still pretty crude but it works.

all the best,  Alex



Prof. Alexander Repenning

University of Colorado
Computer Science Department
Boulder, CO 80309-430

vCard: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/AlexanderRepenning.vcf


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