LibFloyd 0.12.2 review

Floyd is an advanced 3D scene graph library, exploiting Gtk+, OpenGL and other advanced techniques. I was very impressed both of t

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Lauris Kaplinski

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Floyd is an advanced 3D scene graph library, exploiting Gtk+, OpenGL and other advanced techniques.

I was very impressed both of the ease of use and power of Gtk+ toolkit and especially the superb 2D graphics library GnomeCanvas. Looking around for something similar in 3D world, left me in complete disappointment. All existing toolkits had the following disadvantages:

Were proprietary
Were written in C++ or Java
Were overcomplicated
Lacked essential features

I completely admit, that C++ is good language for program development, but it is not, in any means, suitable for libraries. The main problem is, that C++ classes can be extended only in C++. With C/Gtk+ classes, in contrary, it is possible to derive new classes runtime, using scripting languages or user interface. Gtk+ flexibility has been proven by more than dozen different language bindings available to it.

Here are some key features of "LibFloyd":
extremely flexible object-oriented structure
3DNow! accelerated library of 2D/3D primitives
state preserving OpenGL objects with on-demand execution
tree of virtual world objects with asynchronous rendering
asynchronous collision detection
vision rays and ray collision
exact and preferred-time timers