Winter Quarter 1999 Server Additions by the Network/Communications Group

Server Notes

The only generic server note worth pointing out is that with the addition of the second platform the Server can be compiled for, the server was renamed to be server.sun for the solaris port. Likewise, as for the sgi compile, you can run chmakefile before compiling to make sure you're running the compile withthe correct Makefile.

Solaris Client Work

The network/comm group placed the build of a Soalris client on their plate for the quarter. Unfortunately, the foresight was not seen that a working viewer would be necessary to demonstrate the working client code. In this respect, we learned two important details as we built the old viewer (not the newly standardized upon viewer_gui).

The SGI client relies heavily upon GLUT. GLUT is the GL user toolkit. This is necessary for many of the GL calls, including the one that opens the viewer window. The GLUT implementation that was downloaded and built relied upon imake and cpp to generate the Makefile, and was a general bear to compile and link in. Basically, the lesson learned was make sure that /usr/X11/bin was in your path so imake could call cpp correctly.

The GL calls are counted on to shovel the processing off to the video hardware. This is not possible on machines that do not support GL in the hardware. Whereas Solaris 7 supports GL, it is mostly a software implementation as most hardware running Solaris 7 in the CoC doesn't support the GL natively. This means the client is amazingly slow on machines without this dedicated hardware. On this note, it is reccomended that the client be run on a machine with the Creator 3D hardware. Arsenal in the GVU lab is the best candidate.

Thu Mar 18 23:02:27 EST 1999

Stephen Forinash (autmieon@cc)
J Austin Hijar (sithlord@cc)