3D based desktop?

[oiaohm]

The hell over microsoft blocking direct rendering of opengl came from ATI and Nvidia. Only time they were not fighting with each other.

It was simple give us back Direct Opengl rendering. Or you get no 3d drivers from us at all. Biggest standard writers of Opengl these days is NVidia and ATI. Some one did not do there homework at Microsoft. Telling the creators of a standard that after all there hard work they have to bin it was never going to fly.

[Z98]

That's actually hilarious. It's nice to know someone has the power to tell Microsoft to shut up and do things their way. Besides the government, since that usually takes a few years to go through the court system.

[Durel]

I never really got the idea behind a 3D desktop. always been more in favour of blackbox (and windows alternatives) for designing everything the way you want.

the only usefull 3d-ish feature i can imagine is using a Z-index (like div layers) and it would be an awesome feature at that. i always want my chat screens to be on top of multiple other windows. but certain things like image viewers should be able to go over THAT without too much effort.

imho that would be a VERY awesome feature to have, but im quite sure i stand alone in wanting that :p

[Nmn]

I'd love to have a 3D Desktop with React OS. But until its beta, and of course until nVidia drivers(Of course, ATi, Intel, and other drivers would be nice to have working, but react os never ran them at any point) work again, its not something to worry about.

I do think that React OS should be designed with 3D Desktops in mind. It would be cool if we had a layer between the hardware mouse driver and applications that would be ready to change, so we could make windows that were in different positions and rotations in the 3D world react correctly to the mouse. But i doubt it will be taken so overly serious - the most you can hope for is a basic 3D desktop, kind of minimalistic for a 3D desktop, that makes React OS more modern. I mean, making it so every window reads different mouse coordinates because of the distance and rotation of the window would be going way out of hand, but having a smoothly moving desktop with a decently neat minimize, maximize and close effects is just fine for me. Maybe a nice looking window border.

Now I'm just blabbing though, since this is so far ahead and I'm a terrible programmer.

Seriously though, this stuff would be nice for after alpha, but i think that it belongs somewhere after 1.0. I'm sure that the talented developers working on React OS will eventually do something related. Its just that in stages like this compatibility, optimization, and clean code are much much more important.

edit: And i would love to hear if you can still play UT on React OS and what graphics driver (If not Mesa) works to be doing so.

[Z98]

The developers have consistently stated that any 3D desktop will have to be third party and will not be included as part of the base ReactOS. Most of them don't see a need for it from a functional standpoint anyways.

[.aart3k]

ReactOS is fully open source, so it is possible to revese engeinner aero basis and make an... distribution? of reactos. But state of ROS distros... not at the moment, but i think it could be great for marketing and popularity in the future.

[oiaohm]

.aart3k Yes but there is more important things at moment like a stable reactos.

Depending on what happens we might not be worried about aero.

All depends how kde4 turns out on win32 and win64 platforms.

[.aart3k]

kde is built on qt so i think there's no connection to reactos where we are basing on winapi, i meant aero's underlaying desktop window manager (not like gdi: making graph drawing directly to screen) as basis for compositing effects and functionality.

i know that we need something like stable reactos but branching? sh..t there's always the same problem: we have no enough devs..

[VincentMX]

already been asked: http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25300.

[oiaohm]

KDE 4 on windows draws directly to screen threw Opengl at this stage.

Aero goes threw Direct X only so if you have a card that perform better in opengl you are out of luck.

KDE 4 will take no work from Reactos developers. Other than fixing defects in reactos as need. Since the KDE 4 developers are doing the cross port.

KDE 4 requires a lot less memory than Aero. Min mode is still only a 64 meg overhead. So a operational system with KDE 4 with Reactos is still under 128 megs of ram. KDE 4 fully operational at 256 megs of ram even running applications.

KDE 4 on reactos is still not light weight as reactos is aiming at.

[crhylove]

As soon as there is a GOOD 3d desktop environment, all the OSes (including ReactOS) will have an implemented version. At the moment though, most 3d desktops don't really offer any improved functionality to anybody for anything.

rhY

[.aart3k]

i'd like to mention macos x as 3d based (compositing + opengl) desktop, 3d desktop is not only the rotating desktop cube

[atarixle]

i'd like to mention macos x as 3d based (compositing + opengl) desktop, 3d desktop is not only the rotating desktop cube

In fact, there's nearly no 3D-effect on the Mac OS X Desktop - only hardware-rendered windows and shadows

[cmoibenlepro]

That's openGL anyway.

[diddledan]

to quote PCPlus, a computer magazine here in the UK, windows and macOSX use a system that can be described as "2.5D", not 3D. This is because they don't do fancy threedimensional effects and whatnot, but instead every window is rendered seperately (including the root window - ie the desktop) and then composited onto the screen using the 3D graphics card. This has the advantage that you don't have to worry about damage and redrawing, as it is all handled by the GPU. I've been playing with vista since it's release, and can say that the 2.5D improves things for me. 3D does not necessarily mean having a desktop that you walk through like doom, but rather utilising the previously untapped power that lies dormant in your graphics hardware until you fire up a game.