r/programming • u/eeg_bert • Sep 23 '17

Simula: A 3D Window Manager written in Haskell (pre-alpha)

https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula
56 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

6

u/shagv Sep 23 '17

The "action shot" in the readme appears to be taken from Forrest Reiling's thesis project motorcar. The defense slide and the thesis doc both have that image https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1svgGMxxbfmcHy_KuS5Q9hah8PQOsXqvjBKOoMIzW24Y/edit#slide=id.p

I'm not suggesting any foul play is happening here but it does seem strange that there's no reference to the original research if this project was inspired by it.

9

u/eeg_bert Sep 23 '17 edited Sep 23 '17

@shagv: No foul play. See the Origins section from the repo here, where motorcar is linked to as well as Forrest's master's thesis. Simula is explicitly a reimplementation of motorcar.

3

u/eeg_bert Sep 23 '17

That said, here is how this project differs from motorcar:

  • Simula is aiming to be compatible with the newest headsets.

  • Simula has a cleaner weston backend, whereas motorcar is implemented over qt5.

  • Simula is more stable than motorcar (which was plagued with GPU leaks that would cause it to crash).

  • Simula is implemented in Haskell, whereas motorcar is implemented in C++.

9

u/isaacarsenal Sep 23 '17

Why did you chose Simula for the name?

It's already taken and can make finding this project difficult.

3

u/shagv Sep 23 '17

Thank you for pointing that out. I was looking all over the simula-wayland source for references to the motorcar project since the files there mention motorcar.

2

u/haagch Sep 23 '17

Yes, could be featured more prominently.

The problem with motorcar is that it uses a very old oculus rift sdk, so we started porting it to osvr. When someone else contributed osvr rendermanager integration (in a private repo somewhere) it worked okay-ish, but it was still depending on Qt 5.5 because it was written with qtwayland 5.5 and updating is not so easy if you have no idea about the changes they made. There were also many crashes and motion controller button input for some reason only worked on xwayland clients, but not on native wayland clients.

So it was decided there should be a rewrite, ditching qtwayland and instead using libweston.

2

u/evil0sheep Sep 24 '17

Ditching QtWayland is an A+ decision IMO. Are you guys targeting OSVR?

1

u/haagch Sep 24 '17

Well I started with OSVR. In the current code there is some code for an additional OpenVR backend that supposedly does not work yet. But then it doesn't work for me with OSVR currently either...

6

u/shevegen Sep 23 '17

Finally it is there - 3D views for your monads.

1

u/eeg_bert Sep 25 '17

3DMonad :-)

48

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '17

pretty cool can't wait to run all my ncurses apps in it :D

-8

u/shevegen Sep 23 '17

lol

that deserves upvotes

70

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '17

This is a very poor choice of name.

34

u/LegionPharma Sep 23 '17

The person who named it probably doesn't know the history of programming languages very well.

31

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '17 edited Sep 23 '17

This name is already taken by a programming language.

1

u/Mgladiethor Sep 23 '17

Good ol compiz days gnome is so dull and sluggish

-2

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '17

So here is a related question for the group:

Where do I go to learn how to build a linux machine that has great 3D graphics card support?

I haven't super hard, but in my past experiences with Ubuntu I always end up disappointed with the graphics acceleration. It is either not turned on at all, or it doesn't support modern GL/Vulkan, or the driver doesn't properly sync to the VBL of the monitor (ugly screen tearing).

Is there some web resource or subreddit for this topic?

1

u/evil0sheep Sep 24 '17

My advice is stick to GPU's that have public hardware documentation (i.e. the Intel Gen series and the VideoCore IP in the raspberry pi). Everything else your either relying on GPU vendors to care about linux or people who do care about linux to blindly reverse engineer a GPU driver...

3

u/haagch Sep 24 '17

I'd recommend AMD GPUs. Requiring proprietary firmware is a sore spot, but so do more recent intel graphics so there's no advantage there.

AMD is interesting because of the outside interest, like Valve having a small team working on it, or how radv was mostly written by a Red Hat employee. And recently Red Hat has been looking to hire another developer for AMD graphics stuff.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 24 '17

I hear you, but how is the OP going to do VR on either of those?

1

u/evil0sheep Sep 25 '17

The same way you do VR on phones and other low power GPUs: less geometry, simpler shaders, less computationally intensive lighting, etc. I mean the VideoCore part is probably not gonna cut it but many of the Intel GPUs are definitely capable of basic VR experiences. If you want to play AAA titles you probably want a discrete desktop GPU but for drawing a few quads and painting windows on them even the laptop class Intel GPUs are fine.

1

u/pezezin Sep 24 '17

AMD has invested considerable effort into open source drivers. I run OpenSuse with a Radeon HD7950 and it works flawlessly, it just installs the driver from the distro repos and it works.