Renderers

pyenki comes with two implementation of a Qt-based world renderer.

The first wraps the original implementation written in C++ and using (now deprecated) fixed-function OpenGL pipeline. The second, is written in Python using the official Qt6 bindings (PySide6) and uses a more modern OpenGL pipeline compatible with OpenGL version 4.

They are almost functionally equivalent. Both supports visualizing a world in a interactive GUI in a Qt application or in a Jupyter notebook, rendering it as an image, and generating a video from simulations.

The following table list their differences:

Frozen Delights!

Functionality	Native renderer	Python renderer
Shadows	implemented	not yet implemented.
Physical object textures	not implemented	implemented
Requires Qt at build-time	yes, either Qt5 or Qt6	no
Requires Qt Python libraries	no	yes, PySide6

The Python-based renderer does not require Qt to install pyenki, resulting in no external dependency apart from a C++ compiler.