Click on the thumbnails to view them full size...
Mac OS X / Aqua |
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This is a simple viewer app that I threw together for examining Nendo models on Mac OS X... With the combined power of OpenStep/Cocoa and OpenGL, it took me all of a day and a half to wire it up (most of which was spent writing the Game Exchange parser). It's now available for download here. |
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A short time later and with very little additional work, I added the ability to edit models' material properties. The object browser and material inspector shown here -- along with all of the model representation, importing, and rendering functionality used by the viewer app -- are components of a framework that can be resued to create any number of other 3D tools. |
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Nendo, by the way, was an excellent $99 winged-edge 3D modeler and paint program from Winged Edge Technologies (formerly Nichimen Graphics) -- very fast, with a beautifully simple and clean UI. Sadly, I've learned that Winged Edge is no longer in business (despite their Web site still being up), so there seems to be little hope of seeing Nendo (or its Maya-caliber sister app, the high-end modeling and animation package Mirai) ported to Mac OS X...
OPENSTEP Enterprise (Windows 95/98/NT) |
OpenStep running on Windows isn't extraordinarily visually appealing in and of itself (for the most part it just looks like ... well, like Windows). But the leverage it provides is a thing of definite beauty.
These screen grabs are from a layout app I created while working on a PlayStation baseball game at Page 44 Studios, for managing placement of texture bitmaps and palettes in video memory. (PlayStation VRAM is addressed 2-dimensionally, which makes texture management a constant chore, and texture collisions an unending source of debugging headaches.)
This app could load texture placement templates (gray outlines) and textures
with associated placement information from game data files, and enabled one to
visually inspect and manipulate the layouts via selection and dragging.
(Formerly, this was done using text editors and command-line tools.)
Having this tool saved me untold amounts of time and frustration. But without the developer productivity benefits provided by OpenStep I surely wouldn't have been able to find sufficient time, amid the game's hectic development schedule, to write it...
This project is now the subject of an article
I wrote for StepWise!
Solaris OPENSTEP |
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In addition to producing the public OpenStep API specification, NeXT's brief collaboration with Sun yielded a version of the OpenStep frameworks, tools, and application suite that ran atop Sun's Solaris operating system. Shown here is the Solaris desktop, with the OpenStep Dock, Mail program and Workspace app running alongside a Solaris calendar program. |
OPENSTEP/NeXTSTEP |
These screen grabs are now somewhat dated, but may still be of interest. For a peek at Mac OS X's new "Aqua" UI, have a look at Apple's Mac OS X page.
John Kheit's page has a number of nice OPENSTEP screen shots on it as well.
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These OPENSTEP screenshots date to around the final days of NeXT, just before the company was acquired by Apple. (The first image alludes to the imminent NeXT-Apple merger in its Mail window graphic.) The second image is a screen grab from an unfinished beta version of OPENSTEP, in which a replacement for the much loved "Dock" was being considered. |
The original Quake level editor used at id Software, John Carmack's own QuakeEd, was developed on NeXTSTEP. Screen shots here show the original version as well as prototype screens for a later redesign:
