On Sep 8, 2004, at 2:37 PM, chris clepper wrote:
Your request for multiple windows is a good one, and it will happen, but it is part of a larger project that goes beyond having some preview windows. At this point, the GEM developers are starting to not discuss development on the level of individual features and enhancements, but rather at the level of systems design and implementation. This seems to be very different from how most software is worked on, and I'm hoping it leads to a lot of new tools and solves some problems. There really is a vast area of ideas relating to video and graphics that haven't even been touched on by anyone working on this type of software. Right now, I want to explore these avenues rather than just coding up some more video plugins and adding more variants of existing features, which is unfortunately seems to be the most common path for software developers to take.
...I agree here: GEM was originally written before most computers had hardware acceleration, somewhere around OpenGL 1.0? 3d seems to be GEM's greatest promise, all of the 2d image manipulation has been tacked on and enhanced since...my personal interest is in bringing GEM up to the modern OGL 1.5 implementations before anything else, really...
...otoh, just a thought: if we really wanted multiple windows (in patches or not) we may want to think about looking more into TOGL; it's a Tcl/Tk implementation of OpenGL: is anyone familiar with it? Or know of any attempts to use it as a GEM window? Due to my involvement with tcl/tk dev, I was asked to compile it for OSX, so that's laying around my HD somewhere...but then so is an unthinkably large number of other project starts ;-) In any case, TOGL seems to have minimal OpenGL capability (ie. 1.1 or so?), but we may just use it for the windowing...
hmm, james