I'm trying to make a dynamic display of animal muscle conducting nervous signals.  The setup is a grid of over 1000 color-coded tissue squares (maybe 10 by 10 pixels each) with different conduction properties.  You can stimulate different areas and view a glow (depolarization) that spreads outwards through the tissue at different rates.

1)  I would like the glow, simulated by shifting the pixel colors at each grid square, to be hardware accelerated yet also run in a Swing environment.  Is it possible to use jPCT for this purpose?  I would like to avoid Java 2D unless you'd get just as good performance.

2)  What renderer and functions would I use (FrameBuffer blits?)  I'm still not clear what framebuffer limitations AWT GL Canvas has.  All I want to do is change pixel RGBs very fast.

3)  Would a hardware accelerated option work on Mac OS X as well?

Thanks.

The interview was interesting.

As far as the features go, I guess I just need to accept that some things just aren't feasible!

I found another 3D engine that uses software rendering (Anfy3D) that can do  reflections, projected shadows, and cool additive blending (for fire particles).  But it is not a free engine nor is it tailored to creating games like jPCT.  Perhaps it would be possible to incorporate these features into jPCT?

http://www.anfyteam.com/anj/anfy3d/anfy3d.html
Then click "Watch another version" to see some more effects.

Thanks for the fast reply.  Although it's too bad sw rendering can't do everything  :wink: I think jPCT is still great in that you don't have to download any plugins in order to get a little 3D.

OK

Is there a way to have multiple UV coordinates for objects such that you can tile a brick texture, but also stretch out a single light map on that surface?  How would you recommend doing lightmaps?  Thanks.

Are volume/stencil shadows feasible for jPCT?

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2036.asp