Hey all,
I've got 0.90 on the powerbook and quite happy. I am (unfortunately) getting crashes, but it requires quite a bit more investigation. I can't figure out how to reproduce it, but still happens often. It is certainly related to creating the gemwin the second time... I'll send more info when I can figure it out.
As for feature requests I've got two big ones:
1. Support for loading video clips and still images with alpha channels intact! (PNG loader for stills, no idea what video formats contain alpha channels?) pix_mask is not so important per-se as long as one can actually use graphics with alpha channels. I've only even used pix_mask for loading images with custom-made masks. Mind you using the RGB channels of one video stream as the alpha of another stream could be very interesting. The most obvious example of this I can think of is using nice pre-rendered Gaussian blurred drop-shadows that still work no matter what is behind them.
2. I've made a little test of using the gem-win as an interactive interface surface. Each object calculates its own bounds, taking into consideration position and scaling. Then I convert the pixel coords of the mouse to gemcoords and each object tests if the mouse is on it and then acts accordingly. I've got scale-up rollovers and drag and drop stuff working. This is really ugly though, so I propose an object that returns the bounds (in gem units) in 3D no matter what scaling and rotation objects may be present to mess up the bounding-box. Bounding-box is the first step but ideally I would like to be able to test if a certain coordinate overlaps some part of an object in 3D space. Since a bounding-box does not actually correspond to the surface of an object unless it is a rectangle that can only be rotated by 90 degree increments. I would imagine that the more complex the geo the harder to calculate if a point overlaps? This object could grow into a number of comparison objects for collision detection, testing if objects occlude one and other etc..
3. Gemtablet working on OSX ?
Thanks all for your hard work and great contribution to a very powerful piece of software.
Ben
James Tittle II wrote:
On Jun 18, 2004, at 7:58 AM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
hi all.
now that the gem-0.90 release is out for some weeks, i think it is time to start some traffic on this list again. (but of course: what to talk about now ? we used to discuss the release for years...)
...sounds good to me!
some points:
so i favour c) (with some b)): each development should be forked into a separate branch in the CVS; the core-developpers of this branch work on the code until they consider it stable and then make a call for testing via the list. after it has proven to run stable on all platforms this tree is merged back in.
i would suggest that the releasing should be done on each merge of a development-branch to the main-trunk that adds new functionality. (this can be discussed; it is just fundamentally different from the last release) the main-trunk can be used for bug-fixing...
...the only thing that I see different about this (from what we've been doing) is that we'll have several branches during development...this is fine as long as we announce that such n'such tag is being worked on for feature X: I would hate to see duplication of effort creep in ;-)
new features: i'm looking forward to vertex-manipulation, pixel-shaders, multiple gemwins, MMX/SSE2, new pixel-effects, pixel-analysis and tons of other things.
...other than the above, I think it'd be nice to re-do the basic render system so that we have control over the different buffers (accumulation, depth, etc): this would go some way toward improving the opengl wrappers functionality, too...also we should integrate more opengl features beyond v1.1 ;-) (thinking specifically of multitexturing, but also a whole litany of things that exist in 1.2-1.5)...maybe it would also be good to add pbuffer support (tho I'm not so certain what the big difference is to "render to texture", and it's certainly buggy on OSX 10.3.4 :-( )...and of course, gotta add more model/animation support (3ds (I've actually almost got something for this atm), vrml, ?), perhaps even some form of game level rendering (thinking quake3 maps or such)?
that's certainly a start! jamie
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