digital home of MacSlow

It’s true. It exists. It has a strange genesis. About three weeks ago, when I initially started with the skydome-extension to the cube-plugin for compiz, I had the skydome animated right from the start. But I had the feeling it was to heavy on the eyes and would annoy people with “to much polygons in your face”. Therefore I didn’t include it in the first patch I sent to David Reveman. But this one reply by bobmitch from the ubuntu-forums made me dust of the old code. After foolishly underestimating the issues of ABIs, I beat the patch into a little better shape and sent it to the ubuntu-forums (David also received this one). DeeZiD made a tarball of a new set of .debs for Dapper-users within an hour or so and people could try out the visual “crack”. There are currently two small cosmetic issues pending, which I will fix and offer in an updated patch to David as well.

Some remarks about using it to clarify things. Skydome is not a seperate plugin for compiz, but an addition to the normal cube-plugin for compiz. Thus you don’t need to load a “libskydome.so” explicitly, the normal “libcube.so” will do. In contrast to the very first version I did (I only blogged about it, but never made it publicly available), the current version only a accepts PNG-images as textures. You should be able to load images with arbitrary dimensions. This means that there is no need to scale the image to have power-of-2 width and height (e.g. 1024×1024 will work, but 1000×932 should too). Although some people reported to have problems with non-power-of-2 textures. The reason for this I currently don’t know. At the moment the best guess is that some cards may have a limit of 1024×1024 to be the maximum texture-size supported. Modern cards like e.g. a GeForce 5×00/6×00/7×00 for sure have a maximum texture-size limit of 4096×4096. Here’s a little tip for you… try this in a shell:

  $ glxinfo -l | grep GL_MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE  

Here I would like to offer you a screencapture of the animated skydome in action, but gvidcap just isn’t made for grabbing fast moving stuff under Xgl. It drops too many frames. I tried it and the resulting video is acid to the eyes. The least I can present you is a screenshot of the new option available via the gconf-editor.

@DeeZiD: Das ist ja mal albern… Du wohnst hier ja fast direkt um die Ecke *g*

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 4:32 pm and is filed under OpenGL, compiz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.