I’ve been away from luminance for a few days because I wanted to enhance the graphics world of Haskell. luminance might be interesting, if you can’t use the art works of your artists, you won’t go any further for a real-world application. I decided that I to write a parser/lexer to load 3D geometries from files. The Wavefront OBJ is an old yet simple and efficient way of encoding such objects. It supports materials, surfaces and a lot of other cool stuff – I don’t cover them yet, though.

There’s a package out there to do that, but it hasn’t been updated since 2008 and has a lot of dependencies I don’t like (InfixApplicative, OpenGL, OpenGLCheck, graphicsFormats, Codec-Image-Devil, and so on…). I like to keep things ultra simple and lightweight. So here we go. wavefront.

Currently, my package only builds up a pure value you can do whatever you want with. Upload it to the GPU, modify it, pretty print it, perform some physics on it. Whatever you want. The interface is not frozen yet and I need to perform some benchmarks to see if I have to improve the performance – the lexer is very simple and naive, I’d be amazed if the performance were that good yet.

As always, feel free to contribute, and keep in mind that the package will move quickly along the performance axis.