Chris Oliver's Weblog
- All
- F3
- JavaFX
- Programming
- Research
Epitaph
Although it became too much of a burden for me to keep this particular project going, if you agree with our assessments, namely observing on the one hand the objective reality of today's hardware (you can't actually buy a pc without a GPU - yet if you install a GPU monitor you'll see that it remains pretty much 100% idle unless you scroll a window or play a 3D video game), together with the reality of how the software systems that effectively leverage GPU hardware are designed, and on the other hand the reality of how designers and technical artists work (the people who make the multimedia content we see every day in movies, tv, video games), and the techniques and tools they use, and given the fact that our team represented less than half of 1% of the Java/JavaFX organization, there's no reason to assume that Oracle can't or won't ultimately create a Java/JavaFX platform that does everything our system could do and much more.
People who are experts in programming language design, in computer graphics, and in multimedia understand that there's nothing actually new here in what I've presented. It's all pretty standard stuff. However it's also very cool and magical stuff, and our contribution was an attempt to make it generally and easily accessible via the Java platform in a world where it currently isn't - namely that of the pc desktop, the web, and cell phones with multimedia capable hardware.
At the end of the day, on the one hand we have computer systems, and on the other, people, Connecting them together, and allowing people to interact with computer systems in a compelling way, requires graphical user interfaces (which, in turn, implies all that I mentioned above) - this is as relevant to Oracle and Oracle's customers as anybody else. So, although this project was treated in a way that was less than ideal for us, nevertheless I think they'll still have a great opportunity to do exciting things with the Java platform and JavaFX in this domain.
Although you're reading this on my weblog, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all the people whose work contributed directly or indirectly to this project over the past several years:
- Gerard Ziemski - who was the first developer
- Anthony Rogers - the real visionary behind all of it
- Ken Russell
- Sven Gothel
- John Yoon
- Mo Chicharro
- Chris Campbell, Jim Graham, Alexey Ushakov, and others - whose work provided our gradient shaders, 2d geometry library, and parts of our animation system
- Nandini Ramani - who took the sword for me many times
- Josh Slack and others (Ardor3D)
- Erwin Coumans, Martin Dvorak, and others (bullet/jbullet)
- Per Bothner, Robert Field, Brian Goetz and others (javafxc)
- Ron Perry (Saffron)
Thanks to all for the work you did, and I can honestly say the work itself was a true pleasure.
Posted at 10:05AM Jul 13, 2009 by Christopher Oliver in Research | Comments[2]
The idea was to simply make something that my friends and myself in the industry would want to use to make real world modern software for the visual world. Slimshady is the closest to that, and Chris you made it happen- where it goes from here I don't know. But its amazing to play with what you and others achieved.
Its a lot of fun chatting about something that is so cool with people that understood what real entertainment creation is about. Loading a Maya file with all your rigging and forces just magically import (even multi cameras, animations, dynamics, lights) all just imported! Then you could just get them out of your Maya scene and interactively access them was top stuff and very easy. Oh not forgetting you could also sling in all the 2d rendering you'll ever need (picking, fonts, shapes the lot); even load a pdf, once in manipulate the in 3d space or keep them fixed using a 2d camera, mixing 3d and 2d in one world (not just some 3d node). The physics stuff, well the Radial Force Fields are the most fun, spent hours in the night just playing with them, making things spin around other things and push off of stuff- everything is animateable! Oh and John Yoon went and pushed for full on constraints (along with loads and loads of other stuff) - link this to this, point that at that, rockin! in a few mins you have rocks hitting targets, letters falling into words... nuts!
One of Slimshadys main focus areas was to be able to do the simple everyday things, like for instance a score board, but instead of them looking like some dull flat thing they could be full on like you'd see on the NFL- all spinning in 3d with 2d updating information, even video and audio placement- stunning stuff; or a simple 2d list.
The 60fps was a dream, the curve rendering was amazingly clean and clear; but the winner was the scripting, binding 3d and 2d and all that stuff was something else all together tbh.
I idea was simple, the implementation Chris and the others did was amazing!
Posted by Anthony Rogers on July 13, 2009 at 02:15 PM PDT #
Thanks for soldiering on for as long as you guys did on this project. It was amazing seeing some of what you guys did with this. It had such amazing potential and would have been a huge win for the Java community. :-/ Best of luck on your next ventures.
Posted by Joshua Slack on July 14, 2009 at 02:36 PM PDT #