The Quesa Development Team has released Quesa 1.6d13, the latest release of their portable Open Source implementation of Apple’s QuickDraw 3D API.
Quesa is a cross-platform Open Source project that re-implements the QuickDraw 3D API under the LGPL (the GNU Lesser General Public License). It provides binary and source compatibility with Apple’s QuickDraw 3D, while supporting multiple platforms and operating systems.
Quesa doesn’t contain any Apple source code, and was developed without access to Apple’s QD3D implementation, according to the development team. QuickDraw 3D (QD3D) supports both retained and immediate mode rendering, an extensible file format, plug-in renderers, a wide range of high level geometries, hierarchical models, and a consistent and object-orientated API, the team said. Quesa can sit on top other lower-level (application programming interfaces (APIs, such as OpenGL or Direct3D), and provide the “scene graph” level of organization that these APIs typically lack.
The new release increases compatibility with the QD3D 1.6 API, includes over a year’s worth of bug fixes and new features, and supports Mac OS 8/9, Mac OS X (Carbon or Cocoa), Linux, Windows, and Be. Applications written to the Quesa API can take advantage of an extensive high-level 3D toolkit (including file importers/exporters, plug-in renderers, and high-level geometries), while still leveraging the performance of low-level OpenGL 3D hardware acceleration, Dair Grant of the Quesa Development Team told MacCentral.
Version 1.6d13 has added new support for Bitmap and PixMap Marker geometries, for transparency in software rendering (unlike QD3D), an API reference documentation, and for the Viewer library on Carbon and Windows. It also adds: preliminary support for writing 3DMF files; preliminary Carbon support to the Viewer library; API calls for mathematical utilities missing from QD3D; API calls to translate error codes to strings; Q3View_GetFogStyleState API call (which is missing from QD3D); Cocoa support, new example app and ProjectBuilder projects; support for building with CodeWarrior for Windows; support for turning off extensions to QD3D in headers; and support for building as a static library.
For more information about Quesa, or to obtain pre-built binaries and demo applications for Mac OS and Windows, cruise on over to the Quesa Web site. The latest Quesa source code is also available from their CVS server, details of which are on the Web site.