What are you doing with Sylvester?
Apparently some people are actually using Sylvester. Which comes as something of a surprise to me because I’ve had nobody (until today) email me or comment here about it at any length. It initially came out seven or eight months ago, and while I intented it to be a full 3D rendering environment, my day job took over more and more of my time and it never got beyond being a maths framework. Truth be told, I knew pretty much nothing about 3D rendering when I started (and that largely remains true), but I’d seen other people write 3D engines in JavaScript and wanted to learn (and I wanted to write something that wasn’t riddled with dozens of global functions). And, though it’s so far not fulfilled the ambitions I initially had for it, writing it has taught me a great deal about JavaScript performance.
Recently though, there’s been signs of OpenGL-backed 3D environments coming to various browsers, and however good a job I make of writing a 3D engine, it will never perform as well as native browser code. I still think it’s worth fleshing out the maths capabilities of the framework, though — there are various features I was working on for version 0.2 that have never seen the light of day. Stuff like line segments, polygons, and various useful algorithms for dealing with them. I’d be interested to know whether people would be interested in me finishing these features, and whether I should still push for a 3D rendering engine. So if you’re using Sylvester for any project, large or small, do get in touch and let me know what you think of it and how it should be improved.
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