#ADI drivers development
41 messages in this thread
Dear friends,
I would like to ask you how is it possible to develop ADI drivers for
3D Studio rel 3. I have MetaWare 3.1 and Watcom 9.5 compilers, but I
need some tutorial and/or SDK for ADI development. Where is possible
to buy such thing ?
This was asked before and there wasn't a good answer. I'll ask again
and post any findings.
Enroll in the Gus Grubba School of Insomniac Device Driver Lunatics <g>.
(Gus, you out there?)
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
What, what, what… have I heard my name? do you know what time it is?
it's almost snack time… <g>
<GGG>
John Ti
ssavary (La Luna cie)
You need the ADI developer's kit. It's a CDROM and a major dude binder
with all kinds of stuff. If it is for 3D Studio, make sure you get
ADI 4.1 (4.2 is for Autocad only). You have the right compilers (make
sure you also have PharLap SDK). To get it? Good question… Mine
showed up in my mailbox. Call Chris Allis (I don't have his name
here) and ask. You will have to become an authorized developer (if
you aren't already).
Gus:
>> Call Chris Allis (I don't have his name here)…
Yup, it must be late! <g>
Greg Pyros
Dear Gus,
>You need the ADI developer's kit. It's a CDROM and a major dude binder with
>all kinds of stuff. If it is for 3D Studio, make sure you get ADI 4.1 (4.2 is
>for Autocad only). You have the right compilers (make sure you also have
>PharLap SDK).
Yes, I have Phar Lap (MetaWare without Phar Lap is a bit boring :-))
> To get it? Good question… Mine showed up in my mailbox. Call > Chris Allis
(I don't have his name here) and ask.
Do you have some contact to Chris ? Fax or CIS ? I'll contact him.
> You will have to become an authorized developer (if you aren't already).
No, I'm not authorized developer. I only want to write my own intelligent
driver for Matrox Impression. I asked in our ADESK representative office in
Prague (Czech Republic) and they wasn't able to answer. In fact, I need to
explain them very slowly and patiently why I want to do such crazy thing like
to write my own ADI. It was funny, but didn't help.
Please, if you have some contacts or informations, write me.
Thank you for your help
PavelK
Pavel,
Someone here on the forum should be able to come-up with a number for Chris….
Greg? Do you have it?
Chuck
Chuck / Pavel:
Sure! Just call (415) 332-2344 and ask for him! <g>
Greg Pyros
Greg,
>> Sure! Just call (415) 332-2344 and ask for him! <g> <<
Sorry, I don't agree! <G> I have played the "perpetual hold game" every time I
have tried this! <BG>
Chuck
Chuck,
<< perpetual hold game… Waiting on Chris >>
send cis:mail through the INTERNET to xris at Autodesk.com.
jonas[adesk]
Jonas,
Thanks for the tip! That comment wasn't about waiting for Chris, it was about
calling the main number and asking for someone, guaranteed Lala land trip! <g>
Chuck
Chuck,
<< not about Chris.. >>
I wanted to post it anyways. For all of the programmers
that may want to consider becoming authorized developers,
contacting Chris through Internet xris autodesk.com is
the way to get real fast turnaround on questions etc.
jonas[adesk]
>that may want to consider becoming authorized developers, >contacting Chris
through Internet xris autodesk.com is
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The userid is xris@autodesk.com ? Or chris@autodesk.com ?
Best regards
PavelK
Pavel,
<< Chris or Xris autodesk.com >> it's xris.
jonas[adesk]
>> Call Chris Allis (I don't have his name here)…
Yeah, right… Maybe I should say: call (415) 491-8727 (I don't have his number
here)… <g>
Talk to Chris and explain what you want to do. He will know what you're talking
about.
What does this Matrox Impression do worth writing a driver for? Note that the
RDPADI is, as the name implies, a render driver only. It will only handle
raster information. If this is one of those "rendering engines", it won't do
much good.
For your information,
The MATROX Impression is the upper end of the MGA-I family.
Starts 3MB and goes up to 8MB.
Priced at $1299-1999.
Regards,
Jim Pope
PROSeries Denver
Gus,
>> If this is one of those "rendering engines", it won't do much good. <<
I understand the problems with RDPADI drivers, but aren't RCPADI drivers
capable of this? Yes, the Matrox boards are z-buffered and do "real-time"
rotation on all three axis of a Gouraud shaded model in AutoCAD. I think that
Pavel's goal is to tap this feature for creating and modeling in 3DS (the
3D-Editor). Based on what I have seen from the MGA's in AutoCAD, I think that
there is a market for the driver (especially with the Mechanical crowd now that
designer is about here). Someone that is serious enough about AutoCAD 3D to
invest in an Impression Pro will be serious enough to look at 3DS3!
Chuck
Chuckster:
>> but aren't RCPADI drivers capable of this?
Nope.
The 3DS renderer is plugged pretty tightly into the core code, and can't be
offloaded at this time through either the RD or RCPADI.
A PXP could theoretically do this, but if you are going to this trouble, it
would be just as easy to have a stand-alone program read the *.3DS file and
render on it's own.
Sounds like a wishlist item for R4, though, to take advantage of those boards!
Greg Pyros
I definitely second the wish list item (who is the "keeper of the
wish" list anyway, do we have one?) as this board is WONDERFUL in
ACAD. Have you seen it yet? I have a 3MB z-buffered board that I
use for my Designer demos. I always finish the demo with a script
that meshes the model, performs a Matrox RENDER on it (I have a
default light in the scene), starts it spinning on the screen, and
then hands out the drool cups! <BG> Thanx to you and Gus for the
feedback!
Chuck,
<< who is the keeper of the Wish-List on this forum? >>
I volunteered to keep a ever growing pile of wishes in one place and
hand them to gary on April 1st. You have the option of compiling your
own wishes and mailing them to gary *ON APRIL 1st-ONLY* or to me
anytime between now and then.
Jonas,
Well thanks for the offer, I will start polling my clients.
Chuck
>> You have the option of compiling your own wishes… <<
Hey is this a new Metaware feature or what? 🙂
John,
<< compiling your own wishes >> it's more of an
interpreter though.. 🙂
jonas[adesk]
>>> compiling your own wishes <<< >> it's more of an interpreter
though <<
Aye, and a rather selective one at that. <g>
Jonas, Ok, here's a wishlist item for ya: The ability to have a proxy
image of the bitmap be displayed in the mapping icon. I think this
would be _very_ useful at times.
>>The ability to have a proxy image of the bitmap be displayed in the mapping
icon.
OOOHHH!!! I like that one!
David
Chuck,
my idea (maybe crazy, but I was everytime the man with crazy ideas 🙂 is to
write some code which will be able to do things like rendering for previews,
the possibility to look at the wireframe model with removed hidden lines and
maybe rendered look in 3Deditor. The whole problem is, that I don't know how to
connect my future code with 3DS. Maybe ADI, maybe ?XP program. Currently I'm
looking for ADI SDK, because I don't know very much about ADI <-> 3DS
interaction. I think that ?XP program idea is better. The problem with IPAS
toolkit is, that there is no possibility to write ?XP program which is able to
get data about ALL 3DS entities (including cameras, lights, etc). I don't know
why there is no packet command like GET_FIRST_ENTITY and GET_NEXT_ENTITY. Maybe
the IPAS SDK for 3DS3 will help.
PavelK
P.S. Can anybody tell me when the SDK for 3DS3 will be availabe ?
I'm not a programmer, but I believe R3 IPAS interface will allow
access to all entities. A hardware assisted previewer would be
great. I'll help you get in touch with Matrox if you are planning on
using their hardware to do this. I've met the MGA product folks on
several occasions, and they are very nice people. The only hitch is
that Matrox is a bit reluctant to give out the details of the MGA
chip. get in touch with me if you need more info,
John,
I definitely need more info. If I'll have some details about MGA, the SDK and
some time, I'll write something. I don't like to have hardware with such
possibilities and not be able to use them.
If you can collect some informations, send them to me, please.
After all, it was the result of your message, that I decided to buy Impression
🙂
Bye PavelK
Pavel,
>> I don't like to have hardware with such possibilities and not be able to use
them. <<
You'll fit in well around here! <g>
-JE
I will absolutely help you in any way possible to get this MGA Ipas
viewer to become reality. Just tell me what you need, and I'll call
Matrox personally.
BTW, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the IPAS R3
capabilities. I'm not a programmer, so I don't know any details, but
you can get so deep into the interface of 3DS that it can be
virtually seemless! The only thing you CAN'T access in R3 is the
renderer, if I'm not mistaken.
John Tissavary (La Luna cie)
John,
thank you in advance for your help. At the time present, I need to
find some vendor of SXCI library (but maybe Chuck Mies will help me).
The second thing which I'll need is some kind of documentation for
MGA cards, like ports, memory addressing scheme, register description
etc. But maybe these informations are part of SCXI library. If no,
I'll make some testing, disassembling and reverse engineering of ACAD
DynaView. But it will take time. Next week I'll have the
Impression-Pro card and I'll start the examination of the hardware
immediately.
Pavel,
I should have a supplier for these ligraries Monday or Tuesday. It is not
available from the same distributor as the boards, but my MGA distributor is
making arrangements for me!
Chuck
Pavel,
I will definitely pass this to the technically superior (that's you Gus! <BG>),
as you have definitely left my league here!
Still like the idea though,
Chuck
Pavel, forget ADI. At least in its current incarnation it won't help you. You
may be able to do something with the new IPAS3 but we have to wait for that
come out in order to know exactly what it does. The easiest (if you can call
this easy) way around all of these limitations would be to simply write a PXP
that would read the current 3DS file out of the disk and take it from there.
You will have access to all of the meshes, lights, materials, parameters, etc.
>that would read the current 3DS file out of the disk and take it from there.
>You will have access to all of the meshes, lights, materials, parameters, etc.
Yes, this is the solution. But not very interactive and not usable
for previews. I tried this solution for ray-tracing of 3DS files.
Works OK, but only for static images and with several limitations.
If there will be no other possibility, I'll use this method. I'll
wait for IPAS SDK 3 and I'll see. But I'm afraid that the new IPAS
SDK will have a lot of limitations. In my opinion, the whole idea of
IPAS API is very limitating for developpers. I thought long time
about better API interface (this is the complete SCI-FI and crazy
idea) and I thing that the method of some installable user functions
can be better. My idea is the table with several hundreds of entry
points. Each entry point of this table is function pointer. If this
pointer is NULL (after 3DS initialization all pointers are NULL)
there is no function installed. If there is some address, 3DS will
call this address with some parameters on stack or in shared memory
area. 3DS can scan pointers in this table in each phase of
rendering/editing process, simply by testing the table point to NULL.
For example, before drawing a line to the screen, after generating
one frame, before start of the rendering etc. Just think about
possibility to register function to the point which is called before
rendering. Such function can render the whole image (ray-tracing for
example) and then return the result to the 3DS for Video Post or
similar. The second part of API can be some functions in 3DS which
are called from outside, like RegisterUserFunction, GetEntity and
similar.
But as I wrote, this is only SF. 🙂 So excuse-me my boring message
written in terrible english. <bg>
Actually Pavel, if I'm not speaking out of turn the IPAS 3 is hardly
limiting as IPAS 2. I can't address the specific points Gus is making
but its truly alot more "Open Architecture" than anything previously.
I hope you've been able to contact Chris Allis. Anyway, best of luck.
Hi Pavel –
You might try having your local Adesk contact get in touch with the
developer support people at our office in Neuchatel, Switzerland. The
phone number there is +41.38.33.76.33 or fax at +41.38.33.88.15.
These are the main developer support/tool people for Europe.
Xris.
Pavel-
We had to downgrade our Watcom C to 9.0 to do ADI work. Watcom was able to do
it for us for a nominal fee, but they don't support it. If you have specific
questions, email me and I will offer what assistance we can.
—///Andy Fredrick