Robot Simulator v1.0 
NOTES
20.09.2000


Hi !

These are some notes about creating Robot Simulator.
From the very beginning of this project (my home hobby) 
I thought that it would be pure programs with 
platform independent CORBA (GNU Mico) and OpenGL.
I started with my favorite OS Linux. Everything went fine.
But a lot of time passed by...
I changed my mind and stuck with Unix. There was a reason.
The matter was that suddenly I discovered
the fact that OpenGL on some platforms cannot
be compiled peacefully with GNU compilers...
What a pity!!! ( This is poke toward Silicon Graphics ...)
SGI IRIX has totally incompatible X (therefore GL and Glut)
libraries with GNU compilers!
But I wanted to use cool graphic cards of SGI workstations
at one of the places of my work.
So I decided not to spread my project to whole world of OSes.
At least on Unices it should work.
The main incompatibilities with other OSes are 
in the interconnection between GL server and Robot server.
I use Unix message queues. Robot server was intended to be
CORBA server (it's now dual server - you can connect to it
as simple TCP/IP socket or CORBA client - my proud,#:0) ).
But to compile GL server (which is guilty for graphic output)
on some systems like IRIX you'll need native system compiler.
But native compilers for 99.99% do not understand CORBA,
except Linuces. So I had to implement connection between
these servers using some kind of Unix IPC. To say true, 
it could be simple socket interconnection and it still would be 
platform independent but... sockets are not very convenient as
messages. Nevertheless you can port these programs to run
on you platform (I will not help you with it, no way !!! #:0) ).
At least you can make your own clients with socket library or
with CORBA - why not.

 
Have a lot of fun!

Vlad.

31.08.2000, Karlsruhe, Deutschland.




PS: Guys at SGI, you should "upgrade" your dumpy IRIX to Linux
     otherwise SUN's people will finally have taken away your market,
         #:0p

 
