Hey all, Can anyone help put in terms what sort of network connection and anything else I'm not seeing that it would take to render models w/ JOGL over a LAN from one building to another so that there is jerkiness at all in the rotation control and that it looks just as smooth as if it were running locally or what would have to be done to get to this point. I'm working on the pro's and con's of doing this with my app and I'd have to get a package that does OpenGL extensions for my X Server (Exceed). Currently, the network is a 10/100 Ether w/ a few firewalls in between. Mgmt wants to move machines to another building and doing graphics programming remotely isn't going to be fun IMHO. Any advice/comments much appreciated.

with any network connection you'll have latency of some sort. network is slower than local. To make network apps "smooth" you need to do client-side interpolation. basically the client needs to be smart.

I'm not sure what your setup is that you'd be controlling rendering somewhere else unless it was a render farm; in which case latency wouldn't matter...

What's the setup:

local: client that sends commands to server
server: interprets commands and renders to a bitmap
local: reads bitmaps sent from the server

??

if that's the case it's not going to be as fast as local no matter what you do. to make it fast you need a smart local client that's capable of doing it's own rendering: like it would render locally a really low-res version of the model which would get overlayed with high-res info from the server. might be a cool ghosting effect...

depending on the amount of data being transferred having a direct gigabit ethernet with no intervening hardware (other than a hub) will also help.

-me

Yeah, that's pretty much the setup.

I'm just curious. I've heard that there are GLX extensions that can never be made to work remotely over the network and was wondering what some of these might be.

Anyone have any information about this?