Hi LispNYC/cl-opengl-devel!
I just released a new Common Lisp program that I quickly hacked for a school assignment and have since cleaned up a bit. We were supposed to use C but I, of course, used lisp. :)
It's a fancy 3D, interacive viewer for molecules using the OpenGL graphics libraries and the awesome cl-opengl bindings. Currently included molecules: water, ethanol.
Read more about it and download it here:
I was wondering if anyone can confirm this works for them on whatever environments or has any other comments. Also, cl-opengl-devel: feel free to include it as an example with the bindings if you feel it will help anyone!
The random walk framerate testing mode is neat. The code is also good for getting an intuitive feeling for how GL lighting works as well as a good example of using rotation matrices in CL (gl:with-pushed-matrix is brilliant).
But as the blog post concludes: The next generation of this program will not be a way to view molecules, but instead a way of interactively exploring diverse types polyhedron, like, for instance, the icosahedron and the infinite class of anti-prisms. And don't forget that every polyhedron has a dual (where the centre of each face becomes a vertex). Flipping between a polyhedron and its dual in real-time will be sweet.
Doug Hoyte Chief Operating Officer HCSW Silicon Graphics Division